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Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

VOLUME 4

ROMANTIC COMEDY- YUGOSLAVIA

Barry Keith Grant

EDITOR IN CHIEF

SCHIRMER REFERENCE

An imprint of Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation

THOMSON

GALE

Detroit • New York * San Francisco * New Haven, Conn. • Waterville, Maine * London

ROMANTIC COMEDY

Romantic comedy in its most general meaning includes
all films that treat love, courtship, and marriage comi-
cally. Comic in this context refers more to the mood of
the film and less to its plot. A film comedy need not have
a happy ending, nor do all films that have happy endings
qualify as comedies.

Of course, the great majority of romantic comedies
do have happy endings, usually meaning the marriage of
one or more of the couples the plot has brought together.
The humor of these films typically derives from various
obstacles to this outcome, especially miscommunication
or misunderstanding between partners or prospective
partners. For this reason, most romantic comedies
depend heavily on dialogue. While they may also make
use of physical humor and other visual gags, romantic
film comedy remains close to it theatrical predecessors.

Theatrical romantic comedy is a distinct, historically
specific genre that emerged with Shakespeare's comedies
in the sixteenth century. It combines elements of two
earlier forms having antithetical views of love and mar-
riage. One ancestor is the New Comedy of ancient
Greece, which centers on a young man who desires a
young woman but who meets with paternal opposition.
The play ends with some turn of events that enables the
match to be made. Comedy here represents the integra-
tion of society, the concluding wedding standing for
social renewal. The other ancestor is medieval romance,
which appeared in both narrative and lyric poems.
Romance here names a new sense of love — the passionate
experience of the individual — distinct from the "social
solidarity" love had previously meant. Romance was
originally opposed to marriage, but in Shakespeare's
comedies, such as Much Ado About Nothing, romantic

love and marriage are united. Romantic comedies ever
since have told audiences that their dreams of the right
mate can come true.

Romantic comedy in film falls into four distinct
subgenres: romantic comedy proper, farce, screwball
comedy, and the relationship story. Each of the subgenres
is defined by the ways in which love, romance, and
marriage are depicted and, especially, how they are
related to each other.

SILENT AND PRE-CODE ROMANTIC COMEDY

Filmic romantic comedy in the United States derived
most directly from the stage. While higher forms of
comedy were produced on stage before 1915, theatrical
comedy was dominated by vaudeville, minstrel shows,
and musical reviews. Vaudeville and other forms of
"low" comedy were the first to influence film, and this
influence accounts for the bulk of silent film comedy.
Farce typically deals with characters who are or have
previously been married, and it derives its humor by
calling attention to the restrictions and boredom often
felt by long-married couples. But farce also typically
accepts marriage as the norm, and depicts extramarital
sex as immoral. Beginning in 1915, however, Broadway
theater generated a vogue for sex farce, which remained
very popular through the early 1920s. These plays fea-
tured suggestive language and situations, and they often
set out to test the limits of what authorities would
permit.

Given the limitations of silent film and its audience,
it is not surprising that farce should be the first form of
romantic comedy to become an established film genre.

Romantic Comedy

Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March (center), and Gary Cooper in Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933). EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Most silent comedy is farce in the broadest sense of the
term, since it is most often low and physical. What have
been called the silent comedies of remarriage could better
be described as toned-down sex farces, though their use
of divorce reflects its increasing frequency in America at
that historical moment. Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959)
made three such films: Old Wives for New (1918), Don't
Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your
Wife? (1920). As if to illustrate the difficulties of silent
romantic comedy, these films, like many American
silents, are heavily dependent on title cards, which
present proverbial cynicism about marriage. In Why
Change Your Wife?, marriage is illustrated by a scene
repeated between the husband and each of his wives. As
he tries to shave, his wife interrupts him repeatedly,
refusing to acknowledge that finishing the shave might
reasonably be something the husband should do prior to
helping his mate. One expects, given this repetition, that
when the husband remarries wife number one, she will
revert to type, but the film ends with a title card expressing

a previously absent faith in the ability of the romance to
last. The new lesson is aimed at women: forget you are
wives and continue to indulge your husband's desires.

In The Marriage Circle (1924), Ernst Lubitsch
(1892-1947) used subtle gestures and expressions to
convey complex emotions among six interrelated charac-
ters. Here, irony replaces more overt mockery of mar-
riage, and the film treats its subject without moralizing.
Other silent films staged romantic comedy by importing
conventions from slapstick comedy and melodrama, as
does It (1927), which made Clara Bow (1905-1965) ever
after the "It Girl." The story of the ultimately successful
cross-class courtship of Bow's shop girl and her employer,
the department store's owner, the film uses its title to
refer to a special sexual magnetism that a lucky few enjoy.
It thus offered an attempt at explaining the power of
romantic love, as well as its own improbable plot.

The sound era brought a raft of romantic comedies
adapted from the stage. In the pre-Code era (1928-1934),

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Romantic Comedy

the farce continued to be the dominant form. Lubitsch's
Trouble in Paradise (1932) is a film in which infidelity
and even grand theft are treated as if they were at worst
the cause of minor discomfort. Miriam Hopkins and
Herbert Marshall play a pair of jewel thieves who become
lovers and take jobs with the owner of a perfume com-
pany (Kay Francis). Other pre-Code farces include
Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931) and two adapta-
tions of Noel Coward plays, Private Lives (Sidney
Franklin, 1931) and Design for Living (1933), directed
by Lubitsch. The pre-Code period also saw the emergence
of romantic comedy proper. A pure example of the genre
is Fast and Loose (1930), adapted in part by Preston
Sturges (1898-1959) from the play The Best People by
David Gray and Avery Hopwood. Here a wealthy father,
Bronson Lenox (Frank Morgan), intervenes to prohibit the
cross-class loves of both his son and daughter.

THE SCREWBALL ERA

During the screwball era — 1934 through the early
1940s — romantic comedy was one of Hollywood's most
important genres. Named for the zany behavior and
improbable events that it depicts, screwball comedy com-
bines elements of farce and traditional romantic comedy.
Like the former, it typically deals with older, previously
married characters, putting them into risque situations;
like the latter, screwball comedies end with a wedding,
thus affirming, rather than questioning, the connection
between romantic love and marriage. The screwball form
first appeared in 1934, on the cusp of the new produc-
tion code, along with Frank Capra's (1897-1991) It
Happened One Night (1934) and Howard Hawks's
(1896-1977) Twentieth Century (1934). It Happened
One Night, which swept the major Academy Awards®
in 1935, developed the strategy of indirect eroticism that
builds between the central couple, a strategy that became
all the more important after the Code prohibited more
overt sexuality. In Twentieth Century Hawks introduced
the fast talk that would reach its extreme in His Girl
Friday (1940), where he encouraged actors to talk over
each other's lines. Both of these techniques would help
define romantic comedy of this period.

One group of screwball comedies has been identified
by Stanley Cavell as comedies of remarriage. In addition
to It Happened One Night, these include some of the
most important romantic comedies of the studio era:
Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), Hawks's
Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday, Preston
Sturges's The lady Eve (1941), and George Cukor's
(1899-1983) The Philadelphia Story (1940), and,
although not a screwball Adam's Rib (1949). Cavell
argues that in depicting genuine conversation between
lovers, these films tell us something about marriage.

Unlike most previous romantic comedies, these films
show us the growth of a relationship between the central
couple. Yet Cavell's point is undermined by the fact
that these films deal with characters who are not married
to each other and who often seem to be in quasi-
adulterous relationships. It thus seems that they mystify
marriage by blurring the boundaries between it and an
illicit affair.

Proper romantic comedies continued to be made
after 1934, but they remained a subordinate form.
Lubitsch made one of the most significant, The Shop
Around the Corner (1940), in which the father, Mr.
Matuschek (Frank Morgan), owns a shop where the
central couple, Alfred Kralik 0ames Stewart) and Klara
Novak (Margaret Sullavan), are employed. They fall in
love by correspondence, so they do not know that they
have fallen for a co-worker. At work, in person, the two
do not get along. This provides for some of the compet-
itive bickering familiar from Much Ado About Nothings
Beatrice and Benedict, which became a feature of screw-
ball comedies as well. But what distinguishes this film as
a proper romantic comedy rather than a screwball com-
edy is that the lovers are young (implicitly virgins) and
their relationship untriangulated.

The importance of romantic comedy in this era is
demonstrated by its leading stars, whose reputations and
personas were established in such films, and the leading
directors who made at least one romantic comedy,
including even Alfred Hitchcock (Mr. and Mrs. Smith
[1941]). Carol Lombard (1908-1942), the female lead in
Hitchcock's film, was a star especially identified with
romantic comedy. Her career was defined by her role
opposite John Barrymore in Twentieth Century, and she
later appeared in both My Man Godfiey (1936) and To Be
or Not to Be (1942). Lombard's roles were often typical of
the screwball heroine, who may be zany but also tough,
determined, and intelligent. Irene Dunne (1898-1990)
perhaps best embodied the seemingly paradoxical combi-
nation of the ditzy and the smart in films like Theodora
Goes Wild (1936), The Awful Truth, and My Favorite
Wife (1940).

Katherine Hepburn (1907-2003) endured a long
series of box-office failures, including the romantic com-
edies Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (1938), before her
career was revived in The Philadelphia Story. Based on a
Philip Barry play written for Hepburn, the film was
widely understood to be about her. She plays Tracy
Lord, the divorced daughter of an haute bourgeois fam-
ily, on the eve of her wedding to a nouveau riche prig
(John Howard). During the course of the film, she is
described as a "virgin," a "goddess," a "scold," and a
"fortress" by both her father and her ex, C. K. Dexter
Haven (Cary Grant). In order to become a fit mate, the

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Romantic Comedy

ERNST LUBITSCH

b. Berlin, Germany, 29 January 1892, d. 30 November 1947

Ernst Lubitsch was the director most closely identified
with the genre of romantic comedy during the studio era.
He was known for the "Lubitsch touch," the ineffable
combination of gloss, sophistication, wit, irony, and,
above all, lightness, that he brought to his material.

Lubitsch began his career in Germany, where he
made slapstick comedies and historical epics. He came to
America in 1922, carrying the reputation as "the greatest
director in Europe." In his first romantic comedy, The
Marriage Circle (1924), he staked out the artistic territory
that would define the rest of his career: Lubitsch's attitude
and technique are illustrated by a shot of Professor Stock
(Adolph Menjou) as he reacts with a smile to evidence of
his wife's adultery. In 1925 Lubitsch adapted Oscar
Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan without making use
of any of the celebrated playwright's dialogue. Lubitsch's
willingness to disregard the details of his sources allowed
him to turn bad plays into good or even great films.

Lubitsch made a series of farcelike operettas for
Paramount featuring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette
McDonald, including The Love Parade (1929) and One
Hour with You (1932), a remake of The Marriage Circle.
These films were sexy, stagy, unembarrassed froth that
used music and lyrics to develop character and advance the
plot. With Trouble in Paradise (1932), a nonmusical
comedy in which style counts for everything, he directed
what he regarded as his most accomplished work. He
followed it with Design for Living (1933), an adaptation of
Noel Coward, which ends with the heroine (Miriam
Hopkins) leaving her bourgeois husband (Edward Everett
Horton) for the two men (Gary Cooper and Fredric
March as an artist and a playwright, respectively) with
whom she had previously shared a Paris garret.

After making his final operetta, The Merry Widow, for
MGM in 1934 (a box-office failure, but perhaps his best

musical), Lubitsch became the only major director to serve
as the head of production at a major studio, Paramount.
In the main Lubitsch ignored the screwball trend, but he
made one film in that mode, Ninotchka (1939), Greta
Garbo's first comedy. This was followed by an equally
successful foray into traditional romantic comedy with
The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

If Lubitsch's reputation has not held up as well as
some of his studio-era contemporaries, it may be because
his stylish comedies fail to deal with serious issues, even
serious issues of love or romance. But one film at least
cannot be dismissed in this way. To Be or Not to Be (1942)
is a romantic comedy set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
Although the making of a comedy set in war-torn Europe
troubled many at the time, the film may be Lubitsch's
most enduring work.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Marriage Circle (1924), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925),
The Love Parade (1929), Trouble in Paradise (1932),
Design for Living (1933), The Merry Widow (1934),
Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940),
To Be or Not to Be (1942)

FURTHER READING

Barnes, Peter. To Be or Not to Be. London: British Film
Institute, 2002.

Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Paul, William. Ernst Lubitsch s American Comedy. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1983.
Poague, Leland A. The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. South

Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes and London: Thomas

Yoseloff, 1978.
Weinberg, Herman G. The and Lubitsch Touch: A Critical

Study. 3rd edition. New York: Dover, 1977.

David R. Shumway

film suggests, she must be humanized by being taken
down a peg, which happens when she gets drunk and
cannot remember what she did with Macaulay Connor
(James Stewart). As a result, the prig dumps her, and she
winds up remarrying Dexter. The audience apparently
believed in the transformation, and Hepburn went on

star in, among many other films, a series of romantic
comedies opposite Spencer Tracy.

The actor whose career owed the most to romantic
comedy, however, was undoubtedly Cary Grant (1904—
1986). While he already appeared in twenty-eight films
between 1932 and 1937, The Awful Truth defined

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Romantic Comedy

Ernst Lubitsch. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Grant's persona: sophisticated, intelligent, ironic, self-
aware, confident, witty, but also capable of pratfalls and
zaniness equal to those of screwball heroines. He became
a model of masculinity unlike the more traditional para-
digm represented by such actors as Humphrey Bogart,
Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable. Hawks pushed this sec-
ond side of Grant to the limit in Bringing Up Baby, in
which Grant is subjected to repeated humiliation at the
hands of Hepburn, with whom he nevertheless falls in
love. But Hawks also made Grant the almost inhuman
editor Walter Burns in His Girl Friday, in which he wins
the tough Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) only by
being more wily and tenacious. This duality served
Grant well in a variety of films, including not only those
that borrow from romantic comedy, such as North by
Northwest (1959, but also romantic films of adventure or
suspense, such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939),
Suspicion (1941), and Notorious (1946).

While screwball heroines are among the most inde-
pendent and intelligent women in studio-era films, the
romantic comedies of this era continued to depict them
as if their choice of a mate was the only serious decision

they might face. While they often best their male coun-
terparts in these films' comic battles, what women win in
the end is marriage. Similarly, screwball-era romantic
comedies often flirt with a populist view of class relations.
My Man Godfrey, for example, deals with the problems of
the Depression as represented by the unemployed "for-
gotten men" who live in a shantytown. But the film's
hero is merely posing as one of them, and he ends up
marrying a heroine of his own bourgeois class. Other
comedies, like The Philadelphia Story, can be read as
apologetics for the rich.

DECLINE AND REINVENTION

Romantic comedy declined in popularity and quality
during World War II. The screwball cycle ended in the
early 1940s, though several directors kept working at it.
The most successful of these was Preston Sturges, whose
films pushed the farcical side of screwball to the limit.
The Lady Eve features a protagonist (Henry Fonda) so
blinded by love that he marries the same woman (Barbara
Stanwyck) three times without knowing it. The Miracle of
Morgan's Creek (1944) took madcap comedy to a level
beyond screwball and managed to become a box-office
hit despite dealing with the sensitive subject of wartime
promiscuity. The screwball cycle was clearly over by the
time of Unfaithfully Yours (1948), in which Sturges
depicts adultery not as an adventure but as a spur to
fantasies of murder and revenge. Five romantic comedies
featuring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (1900-
1967) — Woman of the Year (1942), State of the Union
(1948), Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and
Desk Set (1957) — took the genre in a new direction that
anticipated the relationship stories of the 1970s. These
films focus not on getting the central couple together but
on how they get along with each other. In all but State of
the Union, Hepburn plays a working professional, and
the films focus on conflicts that result from her not being
willing to accept subordination to a man.

In general, the 1950s and 1960s were a low point for
romantic comedy. Doris Day (b. 1924) became one of
the most popular actors of the era, appearing in several of
what were called "sex comedies," often opposite Rock
Hudson (1925-1985). These films trade on the same
kind of titillation that fueled theatrical sex farces,
and they were equally conventional in their morality.
By the mid-1960s, the genre virtually disappeared
from Hollywood, with a few notable exceptions. The
Graduate (1967) rewrote traditional romantic comedy
by making the obstacle to the young lovers' union the
hero's affair with the heroine's mother. Two for the Road
(Stanley Donan, 1967) depicted a marriage as romantic
comedy by showing the interleaved stories of the couple's
vacations at various stages of their lives. Peter

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Romantic Comedy

Bogdanovich successfully remade Bringing Up Baby as
What's Up, Doc? (1972), but it did not produce a general
revival of screwball comedy.

In 1977, however, the success of Woody Allen's
(b. 1935) Annie Hall fundamentally reinvented the
genre. Both a box-office hit and winner of the Academy
Award® for Best Picture, it brought about a general
revival of romantic comedy rooted in the changes in
courtship and marriage that were occurring in the
1960s. The genre ratified the new reality that marriage
was no longer the only socially sanctioned form of sexual
relationship, a fact also reflected in the emergent use of
the term "relationship." The basic premise of the new
relationship story was serial monogamy, a possibility
made likely by the climb of the divorce rate to 50
percent. In this new context, getting the central couple
married off is no longer a guarantee of happiness nor is
the failure to do so a tragedy. Annie Hall is a romantic
comedy that from the beginning tells us it will present a
failed relationship. It manages this by distancing the
audience, using techniques such as flashbacks, voice-over
narration, direct address to the camera, and other viola-
tions of filmic realism. These devices do make the film
funny, but they are not so extreme as to produce an
alienation effect. We care about the characters, and we
accept by the end that they cannot be together.

These changes in love, courtship, and marriage
became increasingly the subject of journalistic coverage
and popular advice books. Film relationship stories
incorporated this new self-consciousness about these mat-
ters by overtly reflecting on the events they narrate.
Rather than treating romantic love as the mystery it was
in both romantic and screwball comedies, it now became
something the characters could learn to understand and
control. There is thus a therapeutic dimension to many
of the films in this genre as the hero or heroine learns (or
fails to learn) how to achieve intimacy. Allen made many
other movies that fit this genre, including Manhattan
(1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Husbands and
Wives (1992), and Deconstructing Harry (1997).
Relationship stories by other directors include An
Unmarried Woman (1978), Modern Romance (1981),
When Harry Met Sally (1989), Defending Your Life
(1991), Miami Rhapsody (1995), and High Fidelity
(2000). While of these films only An Unmarried
Woman might be called explicitly feminist, all them
feature heroines who have careers and thus choices
beyond marriage.

Other recent romantic comedies have used older
conventions to new ends. Susan Seidelman gave screwball
comedy a feminist spin in Desperately Seeking Susan
(1985), in which heroine escapes from a bad marriage
in the end. Moonstruck (1987) is also told explicitly from

the heroine's perspective, and it adds Italian-American
ethnicity and a middle-class setting. Something's Gotta
Give (2003) depicts a romance between a geriatric Jack
Nicholson and a realistically middle-aged Diane Keaton.
Interracial romance was first broached in Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner? (1967), but racial diversity and gay
relationships have been notably absent from this genre.
One exception is Hsi yen {The Wedding Banquet [1993]),
in which Ang Lee focuses on a Chinese family in New
York and plays off the conventions of the romantic
comedy proper in depicting a gay couple (one of whom
is white) who stage a heterosexual wedding in order to
satisfy the families' expectations. Four Weddings and a
Funeral (1994) includes a gay relationship that is
depicted as loving and serious, but it is not the focus of
the film's comic plot and ends in the funeral.

In opposition to progressive films, there has been a
revival of traditional forms and their politics. This trend
may have begun with the success of Pretty Woman
(1990), a Cinderella story, wherein Julia Roberts plays a
hooker who not only wants to marry the prince, a cor-
porate raider (Richard Gere), but to find real intimacy
with him as well. Nora Ephron's (b. 1941) films Sleepless
in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998), a remake
of The Shop Around the Corner, are typical of those that
followed Pretty Woman. Both feature plot devices that
keep the central couple apart and, therefore, out of bed,
thus allowing a nostalgic return to romance as it existed
before premarital sex became a routine part of courtship.

Conservative treatments of the screwball formula
also appeared, including My Best Friend's Wedding
(1997), in which Julia Roberts plays the best friend
who does not get the guy, and Forces of Nature (1999),
which reverses the plot of It Happened One Night by
having its heroine dropped for the hero's actual fiancee.
In these films, romantic impulse is rejected in favor of
social stability. Love Actually (2003) is a revival of the
farce that deals with many couples but only one relation-
ship, and even that, the marriage of Karen (Emma
Thompson) and Harry (Alan Rickman), is seen through
the prism of Harry's dalliance with his secretary. Like its
generic ancestors, Love Actually takes monogamy for
granted but also assumes that adultery is part of the
institution. As the number and variety of these examples
suggest, the romantic comedy remains a popular genre,
and it is likely to remain so even if it is unlikely to regain
the central role it had in the 1930s.

SEE ALSO Comedy; Genre; Screwball Comedy

FURTHER READING

Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of
Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

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Romantic Comedy

Evans, Peter William, and Celestino Deleyto, eds. Terms of
Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and
1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the
Difference. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to
Sturges. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Karnick, Kristine Brunovska, and Henry Jenkins, eds. Classical
Hollywood Comedy. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Rubinfeld, Mark D. Bound to Bond: Gender, Genre, and the
Hollywood Romantic Comedy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Shumway, David R. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the
Marriage Crisis. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

Wartenberg, Thomas E. Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as
Social Criticism. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999.

David R. Shumway

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

RUSSIA AND SOVIET UNION

The often problematical concept of national cinema takes
on particular complications in the case of Russian and
Soviet cinema. The first century of cinema encompassed
intervals of Russian history from the late imperial period
(1895-1917), through the era of the Soviet Union
(1917-1991), to the emergence of the post-Soviet
Russian Republic and the other newly independent states
(from 1992). Much of twentieth-century Russian history
coincides with the seventy-five-year presence of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, during which time
period Russia represented just one member — the domi-
nant one, to be sure — of a fifteen-member federal union.
Russia's national culture was subsumed into the cultural
politics of that larger union and guided by the political
goals of the Soviet ruling elite.

Another ongoing issue for the region's cinema was
its dynamic relationship with the West. The course of
Russian and Soviet cinema has been influenced through
the decades by periodic interaction with Western Europe
and the United States. The twentieth century saw epi-
sodes of active cultural exchange (the 1920s) as well as
periods in which Russia was cut off from foreign influ-
ences (the late 1940s). This give-and-take shaped and
reshaped the region's indigenous cinema.

ORIGINS: 1896-1918

Cinema was introduced into Russia through the initiative
of Europeans. One sign of foreign influence on Russian
cinema is the number of cognates in Russia's film lex-
icon. One finds German (e.g., the Russian word for
cinema, kino, derives from the German Kino) as well as
many French traces in the language (e.g, the Russian

montazh derives from montage). The Lumiere organiza-
tion first ventured into the region in 1896, with success-
ful public showings of programs in St. Petersburg and
Moscow. The company also dispatched the camera oper-
ator Francis Doublier to Russia to film local scenes.
Other foreign companies, including Pathe and
Gaumont, followed suit over the next few years, shooting
actuality films, short documentaries on everyday life, that
took advantage of local color and helped cultivate a
possible film market in Russia.

Russian cities proved receptive to European film
imports, and by the turn of the century film viewing
emerged as a leisure activity available to the urban work-
ing and middle classes. Numerous "electro-theaters"
(elektroteatry) appeared in Russia's major cities, showing
continuous cycles of four or more shorts in thirty- to
sixty-minute programs. These modest, storefront estab-
lishments gave way after 1980 larger, more ornate cine-
mas with announced seating times and expanded
programs. By 1913 there were over 1,400 permanent
movie theaters in the Russian Empire; the leading mar-
kets were St. Petersburg, with 134 commercial cinemas,
and Moscow, with 67.

Russian filmmaking began as something of an off-
shoot of this European film presence. The first genera-
tion of Russian film entrepreneurs often had connections
to foreign companies. Alexander Drankov began film-
making in Russia after acquiring movie equipment from
England in 1907 and using his status as a photographer
for the London Times to help fund his fledgling movie
business. He made the first Russian story film in 1908, a
version of Stenka Razin, the well-known Russian tale of a
Cossack hero. The crude, eight-minute film consists of

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

simple excerpts from familiar parts of the tale, but it
proved to be a great popular success. Drankov continued
his film career through the prerevolutionary era, shooting
mostly low-budget entertainment and actuality films.

A leading Drankov competitor was Alexander
Khanzhonkov, who began his career in Pathe's
Russian office before starting his own film distribution
service in 1909. He soon moved into film production,
and his company grew into a powerful force in the still
developing Russian film market. Khanzhonkov pro-
duced some seventy films in the five years leading up
to World War I and pushed the industry toward more
elaborate feature-length productions. He was joined in
1911 in "up-market" activity by the producer Joseph
Yermoliev (1889-1962), who was able to capitalize his
new Moscow studio for one million rubles. These and
several smaller Russian companies set production pat-
terns for Russian cinema through the 1910s. Domestic
productivity increased steadily through the prewar
period, from ten Russian-made story films in 1908 to
129 in 1913. Nevertheless, imports still dominated the
market; when Russia entered World War I, only about
10 percent of films in Russian distribution were
homemade.

The major producers like Khanzhankov and
Yermoliev cultivated a taste for sumptuous melodramas
and literary adaptations that found favor with the urban
middle class through the 1910s. These elegant dramas
borrowed something of a theatrical aesthetic, with elabo-
rate sets, striking lighting effects, and very little editing.
From this situation two major artists emerged, Yevgeni
Bauer (1865-1917) and Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945).
Bauer's feature Nemye svideteli {Silent Witnesses), produced
for Khanzhokov in 1914, illustrates the best of this melo-
dramatic tradition, with a visually rich mise-en-scme that
sustains the emotional force of the drama. Protazanov is
best remembered for his literary adaptations, including his
elaborate rendering of Leo Tolstoy's Otets Sergei {Father
Sergius, 1917) for the Yermoliev studio.

The world war cut the Russian Empire off from
foreign trade and abruptly ended the importation of
new European movies. Domestic studios increased pro-
duction levels to meet demand, but they were eating into
a fixed capital base. The nation lacked factories to pro-
duce new film equipment or raw film stock, having relied
for years on importation for such materials. Supplies ran
out after 1916, leading to an industry crisis that contin-
ued into the early Soviet era.

REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD: 1918-1929

When the new Bolshevik regime began to organize its
own governmental agencies in early 1918, the leadership
took stock of the nation's extant cinema resources in the

hope the medium could serve as an instrument of polit-
ical persuasion. Authority for cinema affairs was assigned
to the Commissariat of Education and its energetic head,
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (who served in that
post from 1917 to 1929) who found the Russian film
industry had plunged into recession. Movie theaters
closed during the last year of World War I and the
tumultuous early months of the revolution. Veteran film
personnel fled the country, taking film assets with them.
Resources dwindled through the late 1910s and early
1920s, and the Soviets could not resupply because of a
trade embargo mounted in Western Europe. Although a
White Russian film community succeeded in making
movies in regions outside of Bolshevik authority (such
as the Crimea) in the late 1910s, the nation's film indus-
try all but shut down by 1920. Vladimir Lenin's famous
decree nationalizing cinema in 1919 was something of an
empty gesture, since there were precious few film assets to
take over.

Lunacharsky set about rebuilding the film industry
in the early 1920s when Lenin instituted the semicapi-
talist New Economic Policy (NEP), in which market
practices returned to the Soviet economy. This revived
the urban economy and the Russian middle class.
Lunacharsky calculated that city dwellers, who had pro-
vided the audience base of prerevolutionary cinema,
would return to movie theaters if new foreign product
could be brought in. He arranged for the renewed impor-
tation of foreign films beginning in 1922, the same
year the trade embargo ended. German, French,
Scandinavian, and especially American movies once again
filled commercial movie theaters in Russia, attracting
paying audiences. Income went to the purchase of new
film supplies and to the refitting of movie studios. Soviet
productivity increased gradually through the 1920s, even
as foreign movies enjoyed long commercial runs. In 1923
the USSR released just thirty-eight homemade features;
by 1928 that figure was up to 109.

Meanwhile, the regime campaigned to "cinefy" the
countryside by spreading the exhibition network to reach
the entire Soviet population. By 1928 urban spectators
could see movies in 2,730 commercial movie theaters,
almost twice the number from 1913. This commercial
exhibition network was complemented by worker clubs, a
Soviet innovation to provide industrial workers and their
families with entertainment and cultural enlightenment
during leisure hours. Some 4,680 worker clubs regularly
showed movies at discount prices to proletarian audien-
ces. And for the first time, cinema was reaching the vast
peasant population. Both fixed and portable projectors
served villages by the late 1920s: in 1928, 1,820 villages
had permanent installations and another 3,770 portable
units toured rural circuits.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

The union-wide film market was also reorganized to
encourage the USSR's member republics to develop their
own film studios and distribution networks. The Russian
Republic remained dominant with 70 percent of the
USSR's film market and the leading studios Sovkino
and Mezhrabpom. But other republics in the Soviet sys-
tem developed indigenous film activity during the middle
1920s. Leading non-Russian studios included Georgia's
Gosinprom Gruzii and Ukraine's VUFKU. This rehabili-
tated infrastructure made possible the great creative
achievements of Soviet silent cinema, including the inno-
vations of the montage directors Sergei Eisenstein
(1898-1948), V. I. Pudovkin (1893-1953), Alexander
Dovzhenko (1894-1956), and Dziga Vertov (1896-
1954). All produced their most acclaimed works in the
brief period of film prosperity in the mid- to late-1920s.

The seeds for the montage movement had been
planted earlier. The State Film Institute in Moscow was
established in 1919 to train a new generation of film-
makers during the rebuilding period. Lev Kuleshov
(1899-1970) joined the faculty in 1920 and surrounded

himself with a promising group of students, including
Pudovkin and (briefly) Eisenstein, who studied with him
in the early 1920s, and then began their own filmmaking
careers in the middle 1920s once the film industry
resumed productivity. Kuleshov and his students took
note of the sophisticated editing techniques evident in
the American movies playing in Moscow's cinemas. They
embraced editing as the key to successful filmmaking and
as a welcome contrast to the theatrical style of prerevolu-
tionary Russian cinema. Rapid editing also seemed to
offer a dynamic style that paralleled some of the mod-
ernist techniques of the USSR's artistic avant-garde.

Among the montage directors, Pudovkin is com-
monly regarded as having followed a more conventional
narrative line, consistent with his acknowledged interest
in Hollywood-style continuity editing, whereas his col-
league Eisenstein explored a more radical montage pos-
sibility. Pudovkin's preference is evident in his adaptation
of the Maxim Gorky novel Mat {Mother, 1926). This
account of the 1905 uprising treats revolutionary activity
through the experiences of a single title character and

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO

b. Sosnitsa, Russia (now Ukraine), 12 September 1895, d. 26 November 1956

Alexander Dovzhenko is regarded as Ukraine's premier
filmmaker and the nation's most revered artist of the
twentieth century. In nine fiction films and three
documentaries, as well as a number of literary works and
drawings, Dovzhenko gave creative form to Ukraine's
difficult historical progress toward modernity during the
Soviet era. His film work takes up themes of the social and
economic modernization program sustained by the Soviet
regime, while also invoking traditional motifs from
Ukraine's national heritage.

Dovzhenko was born in rural Ukraine and raised in a
conservative peasant culture that stressed national and folk
traditions. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917—
1918, however, he was drawn into radical political
activism and allied himself with the Bolshevik Party. He
subsequently sought to fashion a role in the community of
revolutionary artists who emerged in the early years of the
Soviet system. After a brief career as a painter and political
cartoonist, Dovzhenko entered the cinema in 1926,
working first on comic shorts and then on a series of
features that addressed the effect of Soviet modernization
and industrialization on Ukrainian society.

He is best known for his three silent epics on the
Ukrainian revolution and its consequences, Zvenigora
(1928), Arsenal (1929), and Zemlya {Earth, 1930). The
films manifest support for revolutionary change under the
Soviets, but they also reference Ukrainian pastoral art and
folklore. This is evident in the conclusion of Arsenal, for
example, which celebrates the heroic last stand of a group
of Ukrainian Bolsheviks battling nationalist
counterrevolutionaries in 1918. When the Bolshevik hero
proves invulnerable to enemy bullets in the final scene,
Ukrainian audiences would have recognized the reference
to a venerable folk legend about an eighteenth-century
peasant uprising.

Dovzhenko sustained his account of economic
development during the sound era. Ivan (1932) deals with
the construction of a massive hydroelectric complex in

Ukraine that served as a symbol of the region's move
toward industrialization, and Aerograd {Frontier, 1935)
takes up Soviet efforts to secure the Siberian frontier as a
step toward developing the Soviet far east. Dovzhenko
returned to the Ukrainian revolution with his 1939 film
Shchors {Shors), treating the exploits of a martyred Red
Army commander, and he spent World War II making
propaganda documentaries on behalf of the war effort. In
his only postwar feature, Michurin {Life in Bloom, 1948),
Dovzhenko revisits the modernization theme in a biopic
about a Soviet horticulturist whose research promised to
improve nature's bounty through modern science.

The increasingly stringent censorship of the Stalin
regime frustrated Dovzhenko through the second half of
his career, and he completed only four features in the last
twenty-five years of his life. He left behind a number of
scripts and unfinished projects at the time of his death,
some of which were eventually filmed by his wife and
creative collaborator, Julia Solntseva. His greater legacy
was the body of finished work that chronicled his
homeland's uneasy developmental progress under the
Soviets.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), Zemlya {Earth, 1930),
Ivan (1932), Aerograd {Frontier, 1935), Shchors {Shors,
1939)

FURTHER READING

Dovzhenko, Alexander. Alexander Dovzhenko: The Poet as

Filmmaker. Edited and translated by Marco Carynnyk.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973.
Kepley, Vance. In the Service of the State: The Cinema of

Alexander Dovzhenko. Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1986.

Liber, George. Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film.
London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Vance Kepley, Jr.

often subordinates editing to the demands of character
development. Eisenstein's more aggressive aesthetic is
illustrated in his parallel treatment of the 1905 rebellion,
Bronenosets Potyomkin {Battleship Potemkin, also known

as Potemkin, 1925). He eschews conventional protago-
nists in favor of a collective hero, and his more discon-
tinuous editing stresses conflict rather than linear
development.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

Alexander Dovzhenko. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED
BY PERMISSION.

The montage style was embraced in different ways
by other filmmakers beyond Kuleshov's Muscovite circle.
At the VUFKU studio, Dovzhenko developed a trilogy of
films on the Ukrainian revolutionary experience —
Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), and Zemlya {Earth,
1930) — and employed a highly elliptical montage style
that challenged audiences at the level of narrative com-
prehension. Working in the documentary domain,
Vertov decried the norms of linear narration that he
found in most fiction cinema. He called for reality-based
cinema and for an editing practice that articulated social
and economic relations rather than narrative events, an
ambition that is illustrated in his, VUFKU documentary
Chelovek s kino-apparatom {Man with a Movie Camera,
1929).

Montage was not the stylistic norm for Soviet silent
cinema, however. Most Soviet features of the 1920s
followed more conventional norms of storytelling, and
many clearly imitated the Hollywood entertainment pic-
tures that enjoyed such success in the Soviet commercial
market. Boris Barnet (1902-1965), for example, made
genre films in the Hollywood mode, such as the crowd-
pleasing comedy Devushka s korobkoi {The Girl with the

Hatbox, \927). And the veteran director Protazanov, who
returned to the USSR in 1924 after a period of exile,
worked successfully in various popular genres, including
science fiction {Aelita, 1924).

Such mainstream genre pictures and Hollywood
imports drew a larger audience share than the more
avant-garde work of the montage directors. Reports fil-
tered back to the film industry leadership that many
Soviet spectators were genuinely confused by the ellipti-
cal editing of the likes of Dovzhenko, and they professed
a preference for narrative continuity. Meanwhile, the
movie audience continued to expand to include a larger
share of the peasantry, still the USSR's demographic
majority. Cinema officials feared correctly that such
new movie viewers would be alienated by the cinema
avant-garde, and this sparked a debate in the film com-
munity about which style would finally secure the loyalty
of the Soviet masses. The debate would be resolved by
the force of policy under the regime of Joseph Stalin.

THE CINEMA OF STALINISM: 1930-1941

During the late 1920s and early 1930s the Stalinist wing
of the Communist Party consolidated its authority and
set about transforming the Soviet Union on both the
economic and cultural fronts. The economy moved from
the market-based NEP to a system of central planning.
The new leadership declared a "cultural revolution" in
which the party would exercise tight control over cultural
affairs, including artistic expression. Cinema existed at
the intersection of art and economics; so it was destined
to be thoroughly reorganized in this episode of economic
and cultural transformation.

To implement central planning in cinema, the new
bureaucratic entity Soyuzkino was created in 1930. All the
hitherto autonomous studios and distribution networks
that had grown up under NEP's market would now be
coordinated in their activities by this planning agency.
Soyuzkino's authority also extended to the studios of the
national republics such as VUFKU, which had enjoyed
more independence during the 1920s. Soyuzkino con-
sisted of an extended bureaucracy of economic planners
and policy specialists who were charged to formulate
annual production plans for the studios and then to mon-
itor the distribution and exhibition of finished films.

With central planning came more centralized
authority over creative decision making. Script develop-
ment became a long, torturous process under this bureau-
cratic system, with various committees reviewing drafts
and calling for cuts or revisions. In the 1930s censorship
became more exacting with each passing year, in a man-
ner that paralleled the increasing cultural repression of
the Stalinist regime. Feature film projects would drag out
for months or years and might be terminated at any point

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

Alexander Dovzhenko drew from Ukranian folk culture in such films as Zemlya (Earth, 1930). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

along the way because of the capricious decision of one or
another censoring committee.

Such redundant oversight slowed down production
and inhibited creativity. Although central planning was
supposed to increase the film industry's productivity,
production levels declined steadily through the 1930s.
The industry was releasing over one-hundred features
annually at the end of the NEP period, but that figure
fell to seventy by 1932 and to forty-five by 1934. It never
again reached triple digits during the remainder of the
Stalin era. Veteran directors experienced precipitous
career declines under this system of bureaucratic control;
whereas Eisenstein was able to make four features
between 1924 and 1929, he completed only one film
{Alexander Nevsky, 1 938) during the entire decade of the
1930s. His planned adaptation of the Ivan Turgenev
story Bezhin lug {Bezhin Meadow, 1935-1937) was
halted during production in 1937 and officially banned,

one of many promising film projects that fell victim to an
exacting censorship system.

Meanwhile, the USSR cut off its film contacts with
the West. It stopped importing films after 1931 out of
concern that foreign films exposed audiences to capitalist
ideologies. The industry also freed itself from depend-
ency on foreign technologies. During its industrialization
effort of the early 1930s, the USSR finally built an array
of factories to supply the film industry with the nation's
own technical resources.

To secure independence from the West, industry
leaders mandated that the USSR develop its own sound
technologies, rather than taking licenses on Western
sound systems. Two Soviet scientists, Alexander Shorin
in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) and Pavel Tager
in Moscow, conducted research through the late 1920s
on complementary sound systems, which were ready for
use by 1930. The implementation process, including the

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

cost of refitting movie theaters, proved daunting, and the
USSR did not complete the transition to sound until
1935. Nevertheless, several directors made innovative
use of sound once the technology became available. In
Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa {Enthusiasm, 1931), his
documentary on coal mining and heavy industry, Vertov
based his soundtrack on an elegantly orchestrated array of
industrial noises. Pudovkin in Dezertir {Deserter, 1933)
experimented with a form of "sound counterpoint" by
exploiting tensions and ironic dissonances between sound
elements and the image track. And in Alexander Nevsky,
Eisenstein collaborated with the composer Sergei
Prokofiev on an "operatic" film style that elegantly coor-
dinated the musical score and the image track.

As Soviet cinema made the transition to sound and
central planning in the early 1930s, it was also put under
a mandate to adopt a uniform film style, commonly
identified as Socialist Realism. In 1932 the party leader-
ship ordered the literary community to abandon the
avant-garde practices of the 1920s and to embrace
Socialist Realism, a literary style that, in practice, was
actually close to nineteenth-century realism. The other
arts, including cinema, were subsequently instructed to
develop the aesthetic equivalent. For cinema, this meant
adopting a film style that would be legible to a broad
audience, thus avoiding a possible split between the
avant-garde and mainstream cinema that was evident in
the late 1920s. The director of Soyuzkino and chief
policy officer for the film industry, Boris Shumiatsky
(1886-1938), who served from 1931 to 1938, was a
harsh critic of the montage aesthetic. He championed a
"cinema for the millions," which would use clear, linear
narration. Although American movies were no longer
being imported in the 1930s, the Hollywood model of
continuity editing was readily available, and it had a
successful track record with Soviet movie audiences.
Soviet Socialist Realism was built on this style, which
assured tidy storytelling. Various guidelines were then
added to the doctrine: positive heroes to act as role
models for viewers; lessons in good citizenship for spec-
tators to embrace; and support for reigning policy deci-
sions of the Communist Party.

Such restrictive aesthetic policies, enforced by the
rigorous censorship apparatus of Soyuzkino, resulted in
a number of formulaic and doctrinaire films. But they
apparently did succeed in sustaining a true "cinema of
the masses." The 1930s witnessed some stellar examples
of popular cinema. The single most successful film of the
decade, in terms of both official praise and genuine
affection from the mass audience, was Chapayev (1934),
co-directed by Sergei (1900-1959) and Grigori Vasiliev.
Based on the life of a martyred Red Army commander,
the film was touted as a model of Socialist Realism, in
that Chapayev and his followers battled heroically for the

revolutionary cause. But the film also humanized the title
character, giving him personal foibles, an ironic sense of
humor, and a rough peasant charm. These qualities
endeared him to the viewing public: spectators reported
seeing the film multiple times during its first run in
1934, and Chapayev was periodically rereleased for sub-
sequent generations of movie viewers.

A genre that emerged in the 1930s to consistent
popular acclaim was the musical comedy, and a master
of that form was Grigori Aleksandrov (1903-1984). He
effected a creative partnership with his wife, the brilliant
comic actress and chanteuse Lyubov Orlova (1902-1975),
in a series of crowd-pleasing musicals. Their pastoral
comedy Volga-Volga (1938) was surpassed only by
Chapayev in terms of box-office success. The fantasy
element of their films, with lively musical numbers reviv-
ing the montage aesthetic, sometimes stretched the boun-
daries of Socialist Realism, but the genre could also
allude to contemporary affairs. In Aleksandrov's 1940
musical Svetlyi put' {The Shining Path), Orlova plays a
humble servant girl who rises through the ranks of the
Soviet industrial leadership after developing clever labor-
saving work methods. Audiences could enjoy the film's
comic turn on the Cinderella story while also learning
about the value of efficiency in the workplace.

WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH: 1941-1953

The German invasion of June 1941 produced an imme-
diate crisis of national survival and led to a four-year
ordeal for the Soviet population, eventually costing the
lives of approximately 20 million Soviet citizens. All
major industries were pressed into emergency service
after June 1941, including cinema. But the initial mili-
tary situation also disrupted the film industry's opera-
tions. The two major production centers, Leningrad and
Moscow, soon came under threat from the German
army. Much of the Moscow film community and pro-
duction infrastructure was evacuated to the east. A make-
shift production facility went up in Alma Ata in
Kazakhstan. Leningrad remained under daily bombard-
ment for more than two years, and key film factories
located in the city sustained serious damage. The army
conscripted 250 experienced camera operators to make
front-line newsreels, and nearly 20 percent of them died
in combat. Veteran filmmakers such as Dovzhenko took
military commissions and served the effort by producing
propaganda documentaries.

As an immediate response to the crisis, the industry
rushed out a series of "Fighting Film Albums" {boevye
kinosborniki), short, topical films that combined docu-
mentary and scripted materials. Each episode offered a
clear, pointed message on the importance of contributing
to the war effort. Twelve such propaganda pieces were

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

ELEM KLIMOV

b. Stalingrad, Russia (now Volgograd, Russia), 9 July 1933, d. 26 October 2003

One of the leading figures of the post- World War II
Russian cinema, Elem Klimov's influence was felt as both
a filmmaker and as a film industry reformer who helped
guide his nation's cinema through the transition to
democratization and privatization in the late Soviet era.
Born and raised in a family of Communist Party members,
Klimov eventually became a critic of the Soviet system, in
part because his work often ran afoul of Soviet censors,
and also because he championed the reform movement
that helped end party control over the arts.

After studying aviation in the 1950s, Klimov was able
to enter cinema during the post- Stalin "thaw," which
opened up new opportunities for young filmmakers. He
studied at the national film academy VGIK and began his
film career in the early 1960s as part of a talented "new
wave" generation that included Andrei Tarkovsky, Vasily
Shukshin, and Klimov's own wife, Larisa Shepitko. His
early comic satires, Dobro pozhalovat, Hi postoronnim vkhod
vospreshchyon ( Welcome, or No Trespassing, 1964), and
Pokhozhdeniya zubnogo vracha (Adventures of a Dentist,
1965), targeted Soviet authoritarianism, and their releases
were delayed by nervous censors. His historical drama
Agoniya (Agony), on the final days of the czarist era, was
completed in 1975 but not released until 1984.

Klimov's work took a dark turn after the death of his
wife, Larisa Shepitko, in a car accident in 1979, cutting
short her brilliant film career. He directed a documentary
tribute to her, Larisa (1980), and he took over and
completed her unfinished project Proshchanie s Matyoroy
(Farewell, 1983), a sad tale about the destruction of an
ancient village and the relocation of its residents as a by-
product of industrial development. This film too was
nearly banned by Soviet authorities, who disagreed with its

warning about the environmental costs of progress.
Klimov's most severe work was his masterpiece, the
relentlessly grim war film Idi i smotri (Come and See,
1985). Set in Belarus during the Nazi occupation, the
story concerns a sensitive boy who lives through the war's
turmoil and atrocities and becomes jaded and hardened by
the experience.

Klimov completed no other films in the last two
decades of his life. He turned to political activism in 1986,
becoming First Secretary of the Union of Filmmakers and
a leading spokesman for the Russian film community. In
that role he was instrumental in implementing changes
supported by the reformist regime of Mikhail Gorbachev
under the banner of artistic "openness" (glasnost).
Klimov's efforts helped end bureaucratic control over
creative affairs in cinema and secured the release of
previously banned films. He left office at the end of the
decade to resume his filmmaking career, hoping to adapt
Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita
(translated edition released in 1967). He never finished
that ambitious project, in part, ironically, because the film
privatization process that he championed actually caused
the Russian film industry to retrench in the 1990s.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Agoniya (Agony, 1975/1984), Idi i smotri (Come and See,

1985)

FURTHER READING

Vronskaya, Jeanne. Young Soviet Film Makers. London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1972.

Woll, Josephine. "He Came, He Saw: An Overview of Elem
Klimov's Career." Kinoeye 4, no. 4 (2004).

Vance Kepley, Jr.

released in 1941 and 1942 while the industry regrouped.
Throughout the remainder of the conflict, film resources
went primarily to war-related documentaries and news-
reels. Between 1942 and 1945 the industry released only
seventy feature films. Most of their stories were set in the
present and promoted the theme of national resistance to
the German invaders. Characteristic of this trend was the
emotional drama Raduga ( The Rainbow, Mark Donskoi,

1944), the tale of a Russian peasant woman who is
captured and mercilessly tortured by the enemy but
who never betrays her country during the ordeal.

Fewer historical films were included in wartime pro-
duction plans, but this genre did yield at least one mas-
terpiece, Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyi I (Ivan the Terrible,
Part I, 1944). Conceived in 1941 as an epic trilogy on
the Russian czar most admired by Stalin, it was produced

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

Elem Klimov. ELEN KLIMOV/THE KOBAL COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

under war conditions at the Alma Ata facility. Eisenstein
again collaborated with Prokofiev on an operatic score
for this lavish production. Part I of the project was
completed in 1944 and released to much acclaim in
January 1945. With the war still under way, it was
treated in the official Soviet press as a history lesson on
the importance of Russian unity in a time of national
crisis.

After the German surrender, the film industry took
stock of wartime losses and looked toward rebuilding.
The war had taken a hard toll. Approximately twelve
percent of all persons who had been employed in the
movie industry in 1941 perished during the conflict.
Much of the cinema infrastructure had been in the west-
ern regions of the USSR, the areas most affected by the
fighting. Over half of the USSR's movie theaters were
put out of operation by 1945 because of battle damage.
Responding to the crisis, the Soviet government allocated
500 million rubles to invest in the cinema infrastructure
over five years (1946-1950), and postwar economic plan-
ning supported the recruitment and training of new
personnel. The rebuilding program yielded quick results,
and by 1950 the Soviet film industry's personnel and
productive capacity actually exceeded pre- 1941 levels.

Yet even as the industry grew in material capacity,
figures on annual feature film releases fell to all-time
lows. Each year annual production plans confidently
predicted the release of eighty to a hundred features,
and each year the actual figures proved paltry. Only
twenty features were released in 1946; that number
dropped to eleven by 1950, and to just five by 1952.
This bizarre situation was caused by a draconian episode
in the cultural politics of Stalinism. In the late 1940s the
arts in general and cinema in particular came under
intense Communist Party scrutiny, during what proved
to be the single most repressive moment in the cultural
history of Russia. A 1 946 party decree ordered the ban-
ning of several new films, including Eisenstein's Ivan
Groznyi II {Ivan the Terrible, Part II, released in
1958), for alleged flaws, and then announced the party
would not permit future films to go forward unless they
passed the most rigorous examination. This gave rise to
an official "theory of masterpieces" in postwar Soviet
cinema; whereas very few films would be released, each
film approved for release after such exacting review
would be, by definition, a masterpiece. This harsh envi-
ronment meant that most films that passed muster sim-
ply embraced party ideology and Stalinist idolatry.
Characteristic of this was Padenie Berlina {The Fall of
Berlin, Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949), a bloated war drama in
which Stalin is credited with making one brilliant mili-
tary decision after another, thereby defeating the
Germans and saving the nation.

In this restrictive cinema environment, Soviet movie
audiences had few choices, but they kept attending mov-
ies. Spectators would watch every new feature, often
more than once, and they had the chance to see rereleases
of past favorites such as Chapayev. The meager cinema
menu of the late-Stalin era was enhanced by a curious
addition, however: so-called trophy films {trofeinye filmy)
became available to Soviet audiences after 1945 and
proved to be quite popular. These were Western-made
features confiscated from Germany after the Nazi surren-
der. Most were German, but some were from other
nations, including the United States. They went into
Soviet commercial release with new printed introductions
that instructed audiences to take note of the decadent
ways of Western capitalism that were on display in the
film. Audiences apparently gave such disclaimers little
heed; the films provided welcome glimpses into foreign
cultures at a time when the state otherwise forbade con-
tact with the West.

THAW AND NEWWAVE: 1954-1968

Within two years of Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet writers
and artists perceived a "thaw" in the party's cultural
politics. Statements from the new leader Nikita

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

Khrushchev (first secretary of the party from 1953 to
1964, and premier from 1958 to 1964) promised more
creative freedom. Meanwhile, the film industry reorgan-
ized in this more tolerant climate to increase both pro-
ductivity and diversity in annual film plans, gradually
boosting outputs through the decade. By 1960 the
USSR was releasing over a hundred features annually,
the first time in three decades that productivity reached
triple digits. Several banned films, including Eisenstein's
Ivan the Terrible, Part II, were finally cleared for Soviet
exhibition.

Whereas in the 1940s newcomers had little hope of
getting the few available directing assignments, the
expanded production plans of the 1950s allowed a gener-
ation of young directors to launch careers. Eldar Riazanov
(b. 1927) began his career with the musical comedy
Karnaval'naia noch' {Carnival Night, 1956). Its biting
satire on bureaucratic interference in artistic expression
was clearly an allusion to the Stalin legacy. After graduat-
ing from the State Film Institute in 1955, Lev
Kulidzhanov (1924-2002) showed his talent with the
touching drama Dom, v kotorom ia zhivu {The House I
live In, 1957). A loose story that follows the daily lives of
several people living in a communal housing situation, the
film evidenced a debt to Italian Neorealism.

Such foreign influences were not accidental. During
the mid- to late 1950s, Soviet film artists were able to
reenter the international cinema community after two
decades of isolation. The USSR began importing foreign
films again for domestic release and encouraged its own
filmmakers to participate in international festivals. Two
films of the late 1950s won acclaim in the festival circuit
and helped reacquaint the West with Soviet cinema:
Mikhail K. Kalatozov's (1903-1973) Letiat zhuravli
{The Cranes Are Flying, 1957) received a Palme d'Or at
the Cannes Film Festival, and Grigori Chukhrai's (1921-
2001) Ballada o soldate {Ballad of a Soldier, 1959) won
prizes at Cannes and Venice. When the Moscow Film
Festival began in 1959, it was clear that the USSR would
remain in the international film arena.

This renewed contact with the West proved salutary
for the generation of young filmmakers that emerged in
the 1960s, including Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986),
Vasily Shukshin (1929-1974), and Larisa Shepitko
(1938-1979). Although they did not view themselves as
part of a unified film movement, they are sometimes
treated as a Russian "new wave" because of their parallel
career paths and similar artistic debts to modern
European cinema. All three graduated from the Film
Institute and started their careers in the early 1960s,
and they all drew their inspirations not from the past
giants of Soviet cinema like Eisenstein but from leading
European art directors. Tarkovsky is often compared to

Ingmar Bergman, and that debt is evident in Tarkovsky's
first feature, Ivanovo detstvo {Ivan's Childhood, also
known as My Name Is Ivan, 1962). Shukshin's debut
film, Zhivyot takoi paren' {There lived Such a Lad,
1964), with its loose narrative structure and elegant
camera movement, bears a resemblance to the early work
of Francois Truffaut. And the subjective episodes in
Shepitko's Kryl'ia {Wings, 1966), which sometimes blur
the distinction between fantasy and reality, are reminis-
cent of Federico Fellini.

The Soviet regime hardened its policies in the late
1960s, and renewed censorship stemmed some of the
creative energies of these young directors. Signs of this
trend were the heavy-handed censorship of Korotkie vstre-
chi {Brief Encounters, Kira Muratova, 1967) and the
banning in 1968 of Komissar {The Commissar,
Aleksandr Askoldov), which ran afoul of censors because
of its treatment of the sensitive issue of anti-Semitism in
the USSR.

STAGNATION PERIOD: 1969-1985

Russian cultural historians labeled the 1970s and early
1980s a period of stagnation because of the dissipation of
creative energy and innovation in the arts. The film
industry became more heavily bureaucratized in the
1970s. The industry's planning agency, now known as
Goskino, provided sinecure jobs for veteran Communist
Party officials who sometimes proved to have little or no
expertise in film. They were often at odds with members
of the creative community. In a few cases, outside polit-
ical interference became scandalous, as when the avant-
garde director Sergei Parajanov (1924—1990) was arrested
in 1974 and released from prison only after the Kremlin
responded to foreign pressure. Nevertheless, the era pro-
duced aesthetically sophisticated work in areas that may
have been considered safe, such as literary adaptations. In
his late career, for example, the veteran director Grigori
Kozintsev (1905-1973) concentrated on elaborate adap-
tations of such canonized writers as Cervantes and
Shakespeare; this culminated in the release of
Kozintsev's magnum opus, Korol Lir {King Lear), in
1971, four years before his death.

Some of the most innovative work of the era was
done in alternative genres, notably in children's film. A
respected practitioner in this genre was Rolan Bykov
(1929-1998), who often used his otherwise mild, comic
stories about children to explore problems inherent in the
Soviet system. His charming 1970 film Vnimanie, cher-
epakha! {Attention, Turtle! ) has some gentle fun with the
Soviet doctrine of collective action. By the early 1980s,
however, Bykov's vision of childhood and the Soviet
experience had grown darker. His Chuchelo {The
Scarecrow, 1983) took a harsh view of the extent to which

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

ANDREI TARKOVSKY

b. Zavrazhe, Ivanono, Russia, 4 April 1932, d. 28 December 1986

Andrei Tarkovsky remains the most esteemed Soviet
filmmaker of the post- World War II era despite having a
relatively small body of work. An uncompromising artist
and visionary who refused to bend either to Soviet
governmental authorities or to commercial considerations,
he completed only seven features and one short. His films
were years in the making and often faced distribution
delays or limited release. Each answered to his personal
vision and gave form to the central concern of his own life,
the difficulty of sustaining a sensitive, artistic temperament
in a harsh world.

After studying music, drawing, and languages, he
entered the Soviet film school VGIK in 1954 and
completed his diploma film, the short Katok i skripka (The
Steamroller and the Violin) in 1960. This elegant children's
film about a meek young musician who seeks the
protective friendship of a Soviet worker anticipates the
central theme of Tarkovsky's later features: the conflict
between the artist's sensibility and the realities of the
modern world. Tarkovsky's austere narratives found their
visual complement in a long-take style that stressed the
duration of experience. He rejected the montage tradition
of classical Soviet cinema and advocated a style that
rendered the linear experience of time in lengthy takes and
slow, elegant camera movements.

The image of youth coping with external threats
carries over to Tarkovsky's first feature, Ivanovo detstvo
(My Name Is Ivan, 1962), a World War II story of an
orphaned boy living through the turmoil of war.
Tarkovsky's mature work begins with Andrei Rublev
(1966, USSR release in 1971), which concerns the
tribulations of the great Russian icon painter. Tarkovsky's
science fiction allegory Solaris (1972), based on a Stanislaw

Lem novel, suggests that modern scientific knowledge is an
inferior substitute for creative imagination. His most
formally complex film, Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1975), uses a
highly elliptical narrative design to trace out the
fragmentary memories and dreamscapes of its dying
protagonist, who must reflect on a life of emotional
failure. In Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky returns to science
fiction in a tale, set in the not-too-distant future, of a
journey through a dystopian realm called the Zone.

The motif of the artist's alienation from his own
society took literal form in the last phase of Tarkovsky's life
and career. Nostalghia, an account of a Russian musicologist
living in self-imposed exile from his homeland, was shot in
Italy in 1983, and Tarkovsky never returned to the USSR,
eventually defecting to the West. He made his last film,
Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986), in Sweden, but its landscape
was chosen to resemble Russia, evoking a homesickness that
tormented Tarkovsky until his death.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Katok i skripka (The Steamroller and the Violin, 1960), Ivanovo
detstvo (My Name Is Ivan, 1962), Andrei Rublev (1966),
Solaris (1972), Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1975), Stalker (1979),
Nostalghia (1983), Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986)

FURTHER READING

Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. The Tilms of Andrei

Tarkovsky: A Visual Tugue. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1994.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the

Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1987.
. Time Within Time: The Diaries, 1970—1986.

London: Verso, 1993.

Vance Kepley, Jr.

the collectivist ideology had turned into an obsession
with social uniformity in the story of a nonconforming
school girl who is mistreated by her peers.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the peri-
od's movies, cinema remained a strong national institu-
tion. The studios thrived in the 1970s, releasing over 125
theatrical features annually. Movie-going remained a vital

part of the social routine of Soviet citizens. There was
none of the audience decline evident in the United States
in the same period, for example, even though the USSR
had full television service by the 1970s. Per capita attend-
ance in the USSR was over sixteen movie outings annu-
ally, approximately three times the annual attendance
rate of Americans.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

Andrei Tarkovsky. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

GLASNOST AND THE POST-SOVIET
SITUATION: 1985-2002

In May 1986 the Kremlin hosted the Fifth Congress of
the Filmmakers Union, a gathering of cinema leaders and
Communist Party officials. It turned into a historic
event. Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991), the USSR's
new leader, had declared a policy of glasnost (openness)
in the arts and public media, and he launched a set of
reforms to modernize the Soviet economy and democra-
tize its political process. At the May 1986 Congress, the
film community embraced the reform program and
earned the strong support of the Gorbachev administra-
tion. Glasnost encouraged a frank discussion of the
USSR's many socioeconomic problems, including an
industrial infrastructure that had fallen into disrepair
and a society experiencing an upsurge of crime and drug
abuse. Such matters had hitherto been hushed up in the
USSR's controlled media. Gorbachev calculated that a
public acknowledgment of the system's failings would aid
the reform effort, and he cultivated the support of writers
and artists to help promote his program.

Over the next three years, the movie industry went
through a series of reforms that were sanctioned by the

Gorbachev administration. The changes virtually elimi-
nated government censorship of movies and substantially
reduced the extent to which the old government planning
bureaucracy Goskino could influence creative affairs.
Studios won autonomy to develop their own production
programs and to compete in a more open film market-
place. The Gorbachev regime even supported plans to
privatize cinema as part of an effort to reintroduce mar-
ket practices into the Soviet economy.

One immediate effect of the new openness was the
opportunity for previously banned or restricted films to
find a wider audience. A Conflicts Commission reviewed
and authorized the release of approximately two hundred
previously banned films, including Commissar. The
Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze (1924-1994) made
his allegory on the Stalinist legacy, Monanieba (in
Georgian; in Russian, Pokaianie ; Confession or Repentance,

1987) , in 1984, but his message benefited from the wider
release and from the more frank discussions of Stalinism
that became possible after 1986.

Documentary filmmakers were among those who
immediately seized the opportunity to offer candid
accounts of contemporary society. An emerging social
problem of the 1980s involved a youth culture infected
with drugs and crime. The Latvian director Juris Podnieks
(1950-1992) addressed this matter in compelling fashion
in his Vai viegli but jaunam? (in Latvian; in Russian, Legko
li byt' molodym?; Is It Easy to Be Young?, 1987), which
documents the aimless, desultory existence experienced by
many members of this troubled generation.

The most widely debated fiction film of the glasnost
movement also took up the issue of disaffected youth.
Vasily Pichul's (b. 1961) Malen'kaia Vera {Little Vera,

1988) sparked criticism for its blunt, almost crude treat-
ment of the aimless life of its title character, but the film
also earned the passionate defense of younger viewers
who had firsthand experience of Vera's situation. Shot
in a rough, cinema verite style, the film takes up such
sensitive subjects as youth crime and wanton sexual
activity. It even graphically depicts sexual intercourse,
which would have been unthinkable as screen material
just a few years earlier.

The same filmmakers who were so energized by
Gorbachev also welcomed his 1991 resignation and the
subsequent collapse of the entire Soviet system. Post-
Soviet Russia immediately committed to full-scale capi-
talism, and the film community envisioned an expanded,
profitable film industry that would benefit from free-
market practices. But they did not anticipate how harsh
that market could be.

The cinema moved headlong toward privatization
once the Soviet Union dissolved. Over two hundred
new film companies suddenly appeared on the scene in

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

In Nostalghia (1983), director Andrei Tarkovsky evoked a feeling of homesickness for his native Russia. EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

1992, most of which were small capital formations serv-
ing first-time investors who hoped to get rich quick in
the giddy atmosphere of Russia's "new capitalism." They
scraped together enough startup money to make a film or
two before the inevitable industry "shakeout" took place.
Some 350 features were produced in the first year of this
anything-goes situation, and another 178 were made
during the second year. But the Russian exhibition mar-
ket could not absorb all the product. Many of the films
never made it to the screen, and the little production
companies quickly folded when the venture capitalists
went elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the Russian exhibition market experi-
enced its first retrenchment since the late 1910s. The
Soviet film industry had not responded to the video
cassette revolution of the 1980s, even while Soviet con-
sumers were acquiring VCRs and looking for new prod-

uct to view. By the 1990s that product was pouring into
the country in the form of pirated cassettes and discs.
The troubled Russian legal system could not enforce
copyright, and both first-run foreign titles and current
Russian movies were being openly sold in shops and
kiosks, with no financial return to the filmmakers.
Customers stayed away from movie theaters, and 35
percent of theaters had closed by 1995.

The industry began to revitalize near the end of the
decade through a combination of government subsidies
and foreign investment. Directors who had once touted
the virtues of a privatized film industry welcomed gov-
ernment subvention for film production in the late
1990s. Certain prestige artists whose work flourished
in the international festival circuit learned to cultivate
foreign investors. No director proved more adept at this
than Nikita Mikhalkov (b. 1945). Characteristic of this

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Russia and Soviet Union

co-production practice was his expensive project Sibirskii
tsiriul'nik {The Barber of Siberia, 1998), which had a
Russian and English cast, and funding from France,
Italy, and the Czech Republic as well as from the
Russian government.

Foreign investment and a general upswing in the
Russian economy helped rehabilitate the cinema as the
new millennium began. Antiquated movie theaters were
replaced by modern, comfortable multiplexes, with
Moscow's Kodak-Kinomir setting the new standard.
Audiences returned to these more attractive theaters,
and the government renewed efforts to crack down on
digital movie piracy.

In this more optimistic situation, the greatest
artist of post-Soviet cinema launched his most ambi-
tious project. Alexander Sukorov (b. 1951) vowed to
make a feature film that would, in a single, continuous
shot, encapsulate the whole history of Russia, a vision
realized in his tour de force Russkiy kovcheg {Russian
Ark, 2002). In an uninterrupted eighty-seven-minute
traveling shot, the camera tours St. Petersburg's
Hermitage Museum and takes in an array of scenes
depicting moments from Russia's past. However, the
technical demands of Sukorov's project were such that
the film could not be made with resources available in
Russia. Special technology was developed abroad for
the project, and Sukorov had to work with a largely
German crew. Thus Russian Ark, which pays homage
to Russia, had to be made with European resources.
The irony is unavoidable but, given Russian cinema's
long, complex relationship with the West, perhaps not
surprising.

SEE ALSO Censorship; Marxism; National Cinema

FURTHER READING

Bordwell, David. The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993.

Golovskoy, Val, with John Rimberg. Behind the Soviet Screen:
The Motion Picture Industry in the USSR, 1972-1982. Ann
Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986.

Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society: Prom the Revolution to
the Death of Stalin. London: I. B. Tauris, 2001.

Lawton, Anna. Imagining Russia 2000: Film and Facts.
Washington, DC: New Academic Publishing, 2004.

. Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time. Cambridge, UK

and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. 3rd
edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Stites, Richard. Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and
Popular Culture Since 1900. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Taylor, Richard. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929.
Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1979.

Taylor, Richard, and Derek Spring, eds. Stalinism and Soviet
Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993.

Tsivian, Yuri. Early Russian Cinema and Its Cultural Reception.
Translated by Alan Bodger. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994.

Woll, Josephine. Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw.
London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.

Youngblood, Denise. Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and
Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Zorkaia, Neya. The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema. New
York: Hippocrene Books, 1989.

Vance Kepley, Jr.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SCIENCE FICTION

Believing that films were strictly for entertainment,
Golden Age film producer Sam Goldywn is reputed to
have said, "If you want to send a message, use Western
Union." Notwithstanding a handful of so-called social
problem films, Hollywood films do tend more toward
the innocuous than the politically confrontational.
Science fiction films, though, are often notable for their
idea-driven narratives; social commentary, although not
always profound, is a frequent element of sci-fi. It is not
unusual for even low-budget, low-concept science fiction
films to "send messages" about human nature or the
relationship of humans and machines. Their lessons
may be conveyed with all the subtlety of a Western
Union telegram, but there is no denying that good sci-
ence fiction films try harder than other genres to ask
"deep" questions: Why are we here? What is our future?
Will technology save or destroy us?

Though science fiction films vary widely in their pol-
itics and aesthetics, they share some key recurring elements.
Stories often center on space travel, encounters with alien
life-forms, and time travel. Settings are often futuristic
and dystopic. Technology is notably advanced (in many
futuristic societies) or absent (in post- apocalyptic societies
destroyed by technological forces such as atom bombs).
Spectacular sets, costumes, and special effects are common,
though by no means de rigueur.

With its frequent focus on alien monsters and fan-
tastic special effects, science fiction overlaps with two
other genres, fantasy and horror. Indeed, some movies
simultaneously embody both horror and science fiction,
such as The Thing (1982), Planet of the Vampires (1965),
The Fiend Without a Face (1958), and Alien (1979). It is
futile to split hairs debating whether a film is truly

science fiction, since so many movies mix elements of
SF with horror and fantasy. It makes more sense to
consider science fiction (like most genres) as existing
on a continuum, where some films are mostly science
fiction, and others contain only a few science fiction
elements. As a rule of thumb, it is helpful to remember
that pure fantasy films, such as The Lord of the Rings: The
Fellowship of the Ring (2001), or pure horror films like
Dracula (1931) tend to emphasize the power of magic
and the supernatural, while pure science fiction films,
such as The Andromeda Strain (1971), emphasize both
the power of technology and scientific innovation and
the power of the rational human mind.

Though science fiction films have a history of criticiz-
ing technology, they themselves frequently depend on
the most advanced technological innovations. Stanley
Kubrick's (1928-1999) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for
example, presented a very sophisticated 3-D simulation
of outer space and spacecrafts. The film famously opens
with apes using bones as tools, thus taking the first step
toward evolving into humans. A bone tossed up into the
air visually segues into a spinning spacecraft in the year
2001. With its spectacular visual celebration of scientific
advancement, the film might initially appear to be pro-
technology, but its villain is a murderous computer, HAL.
Humankind's greatest technological achievement becomes
its undoing, paralleling the earlier technological break-
through, the bone, which was used by one ape to murder
another. Evolution is presented, on some level, as devolu-
tion. For many viewers, however, 200Ts spectacular effects
blunt its negative presentation of HAL; it is hard
to interpret such a technologically sophisticated film as

Science Fiction

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) offered state-of-the-art special effects to depict space travel. EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

offering an unalloyed critique of the dangers of technolog-
ical achievement.

Arguably, some of the best science fiction critiques of
technology are in lower budget films such as Mad Max
(1979) and A Boy and His Dog (1975), where wars have
desolated the planet. Paralleling Kubrick's apes in their prim-
itive ferocity, survivors are forced to make do with whatever
technology they can scrounge up. The Omega Man (1971) is
a post-apocalyptic film in which most of humanity has been
destroyed by germ warfare. The hero is technologically
sophisticated, while his brutal foes use primitive weapons
and are explicitly opposed to technological advances. The
movie is unique for being both post-apocalyptic and pro-
technology. Other post-apocalyptic films, such as On the
Beach (1959), deemphasize technological critique in favor of
a focus on psychological realism and social analysis. Whether
overt or more subtle, most science fiction films include some
consideration of the positive or negative implications of
technological and scientific achievements.

LITERARY ROOTS

Mary Shelley's (1797-1851) Frankenstein (1818) is often
cited as a crucial literary antecedent to sci-fi films. The
novel is of particular interest because of its portrayal of
creating life from non-living materials and, equally
importantly, because of Shelley's investigation of the
ethical ramifications of the human (specifically male)
creation of life. Later science fiction narratives about
robots, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and cloning clearly
owe a debt to Shelley, though few if any authors have
surpassed her intense exploration of the sublime natural
world. Shelley's legacy can also be found in her tender
description of the monster, who is tormented by his own
nature. It is here that we find the roots of films in which
"unnatural" beings — the replicants of Blade Runner
(1982) and the scientist-turned-monster of The Fly
(1958, 1986) — question the validity of their very exis-
tence. Shelley is one of the few female writers whose ideas
have obviously impacted science fiction film; though

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Science Fiction

there are numerous popular feminist authors — such as
Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929) and Octavia Butler (1947-
2006) — and women, in general, are avid science fiction
readers, but as a film genre sci-fi has generally targeted a
male demographic.

Many credit Jules Verne (1828-1905) as the true
creator of modern science fiction, though one can also
trace the genre's roots farther back to seventeenth-century
imaginary voyage literature, and even further back to
Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Verne's nineteenth-
century French novels celebrated technological achieve-
ment, describing travel beneath the sea and to the moon
in language indicating that he believed such fantastic
voyages could actually take place. Verne based his writing
on research, which lent a nonfiction quality to his work.
He clearly influenced French director Georges Melies's
(1861-1938) technologically optimistic films of the early
1900s, and later films based on his books, such as 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea (1954), offered visual celebrations
of futuristic machines. Dystopic films such as Soylent
Green (1973) and The Terminator (1984) reacted against
this earlier celebratory vision, while many more recent
science fiction films, such as Independence Day (1996)
and George Lucas's (b. 1944) Star Wars franchise, have
shifted back towards Verne's vision of technology at the
service of humankind.

A number of books by prolific British author H. G.
Wells (1866-1946)— such as The Time Machine (1895),
The Invisible Man (1897), War of the Worlds (1898), and
The Shape of Things to Come (1933) — have been made
into films. Wells's War of the Worlds tells the story of a
catastrophic alien invasion; with their superior weaponry,
the aliens destroy much of the planet until they are finally
defeated not by human ingenuity but by their own lack-
ing immune systems: they are killed by earthly bacterial
infection. The 1953 film version drains the story of its
pessimism, turning it into a Christian allegory. The
beleaguered humans hole up in a church and upon
emerging and discovering the sickly, fading invaders
declare a triumph for God and the human spirit, an
ending which no doubt would have appalled Wells,
who died a confirmed atheist. Orson Welles's 1938 radio
adaptation stays closer to the tone of the original but is
less famous as a successful adaptation than as a scandal-
ous event. A number of listeners who tuned into the
middle of the program thought that aliens actually had
invaded New Jersey, and panic ensued. H. G. Wells
himself was heavily involved behind the scenes in the
production of Things to Come (1936). The movie pic-
tures a post-apocalyptic world in which primitive tech-
nophobic masses are dominated by elite hi-tech rulers
who value the state over the individual. Considered a
landmark in cinematic design because of its futuristic
sets, the film has been read both as a warning about

fascism and as a celebration of fascism. The latter seems
more plausible, given Wells's own support of the idea of
rule by a technocratic elite, which he conceptualized as
"liberal fascism."

Many of the sci-fi authors who had some influence
on films were first published in American pulp magazines
such as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories, which
appeared in the 1920s. Comics such as Buck Rogers in the
Twenty-Fifth Century and Flash Gordon built on the
popularity of the pulps, and the comics were translated
to film in the serial shorts of the 1930s and 1940s.
Though these futuristic adventure films did not explore
the serious themes of science fiction, they did provide
some of the character types and visual iconography that
would surface in post-war sci-fi cinema. George Lucas
tellingly mocks the optimism of the serials by opening his
own dark THX-1138 (1971) with a cheery Buck Rogers
theatrical trailer.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), who wrote hundreds of
books, published most of his early work in pulp mag-
azines. Though little of his fiction has been directly
translated to film, his conceptualization of the Three
Laws of Robotics (see his collection I, Robot [1950])
has been influential. Frustrated by reading endless stories
of robots gone amuck, Asimov postulated that: 1) A
robot may not injure a human being, or, through inac-
tion, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot
must obey the orders given it by human beings except
where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long
as such protection does not conflict with the First or
Second Law. Filmic robots (or computers) are frequently
built on these principles, but something, of course, goes
tragically wrong (for example, in Westworld, 1973), thus
propelling the narrative. On television, Star Trek: The
Next Generations Data has been described by some SF
readers as an Asimovian robot because of his built-in
ethical system, though there are episodes where he does
not strictly adhere to the Three Laws.

Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) was one of the earliest
sci-fi authors to realistically portray near-future space
travel; his novel Rocketship Galileo (1947) was the inspi-
ration for Destination Moon (1950), a showcase for spe-
cial effects pioneer George Pal (1908-1980). Heinlein
was also an innovator in military science fiction; Starship
Troopers (1959) is widely criticized (and also praised by
fans) for its picture of a future society in which only those
who have volunteered for military service are voting
citizens. While Heinlein presented his complex sociolog-
ical world as positive, Paul Verhoeven's (b. 1938) breath-
takingly nihilistic film (1997) explicitly reveals the
fascism of the story's universe. Heinlein is also notable
for having imagined inter-universe travel and the idea of

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Science Fiction

"world-as-myth" (there are multiple universes, all as real
as our own, and our own universe may even be a fiction
created by another universe). This complex motif is more
likely to show up on television programs such as Star
Trek: The Next Generation (and also, with great success,
on the fantasy program Buffy the Vampire Slayer) than in
films. Importantly, though Heinlein's books were rarely
translated to film, he was the first to write bestsellers —
such as Stranger in a Strange Land (1960) — that were of
interest to non sci-fi fans. Although science fiction films
were seen as marginal "kid's stuff for years, and only
gained true legitimacy with Kubrick's 2001 in 1968,
Heinlein should be seen as having laid the groundwork
for the mass popularization of science fiction as a genre.

Since the 1980s, cyberpunk authors such as William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling have also found readers in the
mainstream fiction market. Gibson's Neuromancer
(1984) (which popularized the word "cyberspace") por-
trays a world in which distinctions between humans and
computers are irrevocably blurred, and the existence of a
true self is open to debate. Often described as "post-
modern," the themes of cyberpunk have appeared in
films such as Ghost in the Shell (1995), Akira (1988),
Robocop (1987), and The Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003).

Science fiction films were scant before the 1950s.
Melies's Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon,
1902), an exploration story in the Verne tradition, is
usually considered the first sci-fi production. Melies pic-
tures a rocket ship of scientists who fly to the moon, are
attacked by its primitive inhabitants, the Selenites, and
return to Earth. The film is notable for its special effects
(elaborately hand-painted sets and props, cleverly simu-
lated underwater shots taken through a fish tank) and for
its colonialist narrative of the natural superiority of the
white, rational scientist over the barbaric, violent people
of foreign lands.

After Melies, the most important pre- 1950s sci-fi
director is Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who made
Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1929).
While Melies's vision of lunar travel was fanciful and
lacking in scientific detail, Lang was more interested in
technical minutiae. For Woman in the Moon he consulted
Germany's leading rocket expert, Hermann Oberth, and
created an elaborate launching sequence for a multiple
stage rocket. This vision was much closer to how actual
rockets would later be launched than the depiction in
films before and after, which showed rockets being shot
off ramps or by guns. Lang also gave viewers the first
filmic depiction of a crew floating in zero gravity.
Metropolis is frequently debated as a schizophrenic pro-
or anti-Nazi text, though, as film historian Tom
Gunning convincingly argues, the film's politics, like its
convoluted narrative, are impossible to neatly decipher

one way or the other. The film was written by Lang's
wife, Thea Von Harbou (1888—1954), who later joined
the Nazi party. In Metropolis, a futuristic city is powered
by laborers who toil on machines beneath the surface.
The film's powerful visual design — clearly echoed in
Blade Runner — combines gothic and medieval elements
with futuristic skyscrapers. An allegory of social power,
the film literalizes social relations through topography by
putting the powerful above ground and the powerless
beneath. Like so many science fiction films that have
followed it — Escape from New York (1981), Brazil
(1985), Dark City (1998) — Metropolis is a film in which
the city is as much a character as any of the flesh and
blood protagonists.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE 1950s

Starting with Destination Moon, the 1950s saw an explo-
sion of sci-fi. This increase can be attributed to several
factors. In the post- World War II years the American
film industry floundered following a legal decision that
dismantled its longstanding monopoly on production,
distribution, and exhibition. At the same time, suburba-
nization and the baby boom kept people at home, away
from the old downtown movie theaters, and television
stole much of the film audience. To lure viewers from the
small screen to the big screen, many Hollywood films
were produced in wide-screen formats. As well, they were
also increasingly shot in color and featured gimmicks
such as 3-D. Science fiction films, along with horror
films, had stories that were perfect for exploiting color,
3-D, and other attention-grabbing devices. The spectac-
ular nature of science fiction and horror pictures was seen
as appealing to "immature" tastes, which meant these
films could be marketed to the newly conceptualized
teenage market. Universal-International became well
known for making some of the more prestigious science
fiction films of the era, such as The Incredible Shrinking
Man (1957). At the same time, science fiction and horror
became the preferred genres of a newly emerging low-
budget independent movement, of which Roger Corman
(b. 1926) (Monster from the Ocean Floor [1954]; The
Wasp Woman [I960]) was the most important figure.

The popularity of sci-fi films at that time was strongly
linked to mounting nuclear anxieties and the Cold War.
Movies like Them! (1954) and Tarantula (1955) pictured
nature run amuck with giant irradiated insects. In splitting
the atom, these films show, humankind has released forces
it can neither control nor understand. Though humans
are responsible for the advent of giant, murderous bugs
and other animals, these films do not posit any means for
humans to take responsibility for their actions. Nature
takes revenge on the atomic age in the bug movies,
even if American military forces usually win a temporary

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Science Fiction

JACK ARNOLD

b. Jack Arnold Waks, New Haven, Connecticut, 14 October 1916, d. 17 March 1992

Jack Arnold began as a Broadway stage actor and broke
into the film industry as a director of short subjects before
moving on to feature films in 1953. In science fiction
films of the 1950s, alien attacks were often thinly veiled
metaphors for Communist invasion. Jack Arnold's films
deviated from the formula by combining aesthetic subtlety
with ambitious ideas about humanity's place in the
universe.

It Came from Outer Space (1953) tells the story of
alien replacement of human bodies. The film was shot in
3-D, but Arnold avoided the typical ham-handed
approach to the technology, using it more to stage in
depth than to make objects fly at the camera. The Creature
from the Black lagoon (1954) and Revenge of the Creature
(1955), notable for their underwater photography, were
also restrained 3-D ventures. Both emphasize that the
creature may be murderous, but that this comes from his
nature, not from cruel motivations. Humans, conversely,
are driven by ignoble impulses. In Revenge, Arnold uses
3-D to great thematic effect when the Gill Man looks
directly at the camera, then falls toward the viewer. It turns
out this cardboard advertisement for the creature — 3-D, a
marketing gimmick, is thus employed to critique
marketing hype.

In The Space Children (1958) an alien telepathically
forces children to sabotage a superweapon the military is
developing. At first this seems like a standard Cold War
parable, with the alien standing in for the Russians, but a
twist ending reveals that children all over the world have
been similarly manipulated, resulting in global
disarmament. The film closes not on an anti-Russian note
but rather with a strong pacifist message. Tarantula
(1955), conversely, is probably the least politically
complex of Arnold's films. The film is most remarkable
for its avoidance of the evil scientist stereotype, and for its
eerie use of the desert as a mysterious primordial
landscape.

Arnold is best known for The Incredible Shrinking
Man (1957). Exposed to a radioactive cloud, the

protagonist begins to slowly shrink, and as his size
diminishes so does his manly self-confidence. No longer a
breadwinner, and reduced to living in a dollhouse, he is
attacked by the family cat and presumed dead, but is
actually trapped in the basement. The movie then takes an
innovative aesthetic turn: the second half has no dialogue
and is narrated by a voice-over monologue. The hero's
Robinson Crusoe-style tale of survival culminates in the
heroic murder of a spider with a sewing needle. He
ultimately makes peace with his diminished stature,
realizes he is visible to God, and shrinks away into
oblivion. Here, Arnold shows that good science fiction, at
its base, is not really about worlds beyond but about
worlds within.

The latter part of Arnold's career was spent working
in television, directing episodes of such series as Gilligan's
Island (1964), Wonder Woman (1976), and The love Boat
(1977), taking his penchant for the stories of the fantastic
in a different direction entirely.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Creature from the Black
lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), Tarantula
(1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Space
Children (1958)

FURTHER READING

Baxter, John. Science Fiction in the Cinema. New York:
Barnes, 1970.

Biskind, Peter. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us
to Stop Worrying and love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon,
1983.

Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the
1950s. Manchester, UK and New York: Manchester
University Press, 1996.

Lucas, Blake. "U-I Sci-Fi: Studio Aesthetics and the 1950s
Metaphysics." In The Science Fiction Film Reader, edited
by Gregg Rickman. New York: Limelight Editions,
2004.

Reemes, Dana M. Directed by Jack Arnold. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1988.

Heather Hendershot

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Science Fiction

STEVEN SPIELBERG
b. Steven Allan Spielberg, Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 December 1946

Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood's most prominent
filmmakers, has won his highest honors — including two
Academy Awards® for Best Director (1994 and 1999) and
one for Best Picture (1990) — for movies not connected
with science fiction. However, he is perhaps best known
by audiences for his innovative sci-fi films.

By the 1970s, science fiction had developed into one
of the most politically progressive genres, and SF films
were frequently critical of environmental destruction,
government corruption, and commercialism. Steven
Spielberg changed that, starting with Close Encounters of
the Third Kind (1977) in which peaceful aliens come to
Earth to return previous abductees and take away new
volunteers. Whereas many movies before it had combined
state-of-the-art special effects with anxieties about
technological developments, Close Encounters celebrates
technological accomplishment with a childlike awe. The
film justifies the hero's abandonment of his family for the
sake of the higher goal of communing with aliens.

In E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a friendly alien
stranded on Earth befriends a little boy. The one moment of
true menace in this feel-good movie occurs when police draw
their guns to search for the alien, but Spielberg digitally
eliminated the guns from the twentieth anniversary rerelease
in 2002. E. T. is notable for its innovation in product
placement; after Spielberg used Reese's Pieces 1 M as a plot
point, sales skyrocketed. With Jurassic Park (1993), which
featured sophisticated computer-generated imagery,
Spielberg created a lucrative franchise centered on dinosaurs
run amuck in an amusement park; like George Lucas, he had
found that films could make as much or more money on
toys, videogames, and fast-food tie-ins than could be made at
the box office. Though not friendly like Spielberg's aliens, the
rapacious carnivores of the three Jurassic Park films function
as catalysts for mending broken human relationships.

Spielberg's more recent science fiction films have also
labored to mend the family. Artificial Intelligence: A.I.

(2001) is about a robot boy who wants to become real and
be reunited with his upper-class adoptive mother. The
environment has been destroyed by global warming and
children can be borne only by government license, but
these plot points are incidental to the film's focus on the
nature of love. Only when robots are cruelly destroyed is
there a hint of the dystopian impulse that fueled so much
previous science fiction. In Minority Report (2002)
Spielberg again nods to this earlier tradition. It is a tightly
crafted futuristic thriller in which people are arrested for
"pre-crimes," misdeeds that powerful psychics have
foreseen. Spielberg adds family melodrama to the mix,
ending the bleak film on a false happy note when the
protagonist is reunited with his wife, who quickly
conceives a child. In Spielberg's version of War of the
Worlds (2005) family relationships are again central.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977),
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993),
Saving Private Ryan (1998), Artificial Intelligence: A.I.
(2001), Minority Report (2002), Munich (2005), War of
the Worlds (2005)

FURTHER READING

Brode, Douglas. The Films of Steven Spielberg. Revised and

updated. New York: Citadel Press, 2000.
Friedman, Lester D., and Brent Notbohm, eds. Steven

Spielberg: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of

Mississippi, 2000.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness : Penn, Stone, Kubrick,

Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. 3rd ed. Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 2000. The original edition,

published in 1980, does not include Spielberg.
McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg. New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1997.
Silet, Charles L.P., ed. The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical

Essays. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Heather Hendershot

victory shortly before the closing credits. In contrast to
later, post- Watergate sci-fi films, the giant bug movies
often glorify the military and the government.

The alien invasion films of the 1950s range in attitude
from war-mongering to pacifist. In The War of the Worlds

(1953), Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), and Invaders
from Mars (1953) the aliens are purely destructive forces.
In others, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and
Space Children (1958), humans assume the worst about
the aliens, who have actually come not to destroy the

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world but to save it. The Day the Earth Stood Still offers a
particularly strong peace message: an alien warns that
humans must stop developing weapons or the aliens will
be forced to destroy Earth, not out of animosity but
simply to keep Earthlings from destroying the universe.
Cautionary tales crafted in response to Cold War anxieties,
alien invasion and monster films clearly state that humans
have painted themselves into a corner. Ishiro Honda's
(1911-1993) Godzilla (1954) presented a particularly dark
picture of nuclear anxiety: the prehistoric dinosaur
Godzilla invades not from outer space but from beneath
the sea, leaving the ocean to terrorize humans after his
habitat is destabilized by nuclear testing.

There are two basic approaches to the use of mon-
sters in science fiction. In the bug movies and many alien
invasion films the monster is an exterior force that attacks
the world. In the second approach, the monster is among
us, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, 1956),
infiltrating society. Taken to the extreme, monsters
become indistinguishable from non-monsters. David
Cronenberg's (b. 1943) films, which combine elements
of horror and sci-fi, take this approach as far as possible
by exploring the idea of monstrosity within the "nor-
mal," non-alien person, in particular expressing terror of
the reproductive female body. In Videodrome (1983), for
example, the protagonist retrieves a gun from a vagina-
like opening in his own stomach. In these films the
monster, a not-so-subtle stand-in for the voracious id,
springs from within, not from a distant galaxy. Though
this approach is not fully developed before Cronenberg,
the roots of it are seen as early as 1956's Forbidden Planet,
in which the monster appears to be exterior but is
actually powered by the uncontrollable desires of
humans.

SOCIAL CRITIQUE

Though some 1950s films contained anti-war messages,
science fiction turned much more sharply to the left in
the 1960s and 1970s, addressing issues such as corporate
corruption, government duplicity, and ecological
destruction. In 1971's Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster,
nuclear anxieties have receded, Godzilla has become
heroic, and the Smog Monster is the product not of the
military but of the private corporations that have
dumped toxic chemicals into Tokyo Bay. In Silent
Running (1972), humans have destroyed all of the natural
vegetation on Earth, and the only trees left are in giant
greenhouses floating in space. The story is set in motion
when the protagonist is ordered to destroy the green-
houses and return to Earth.

The film portraying the greatest ecological disaster is
surely Soylent Green, in which the greenhouse effect has

made Earth into an inferno and overpopulation is
extreme. Only the rich have access to fresh food, while
the rest of the population is forced to eat government-
produced wafers that turn out to be made of dead people.
The only thriving business is a posh suicide service,
which is affordable for poor people because their bodies
are needed to feed the living. High-class hookers are
furnished with apartments. In fact, prostitutes are literally
called "furniture," and though the protagonist (Charlton
Heston) briefly connects emotionally with one piece of
furniture, the film offers no hope that love or family can
assuage the agony of this dystopian world. Pointedly, the
film opens with the murder of Joseph Cotton, an actor
from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and ends with the
suicide of Edward G. Robinson, another star of that era.
In this cruel world, there is no room to respect old
heroes. The new era is embodied by the sweaty, virile
Charlton Heston. Symbolizing neither old Hollywood
nor the method actor of the 1950s, this swaggering
dimwit is the star of the future.

In addition to tackling ecology, science fiction films
of the 1960s and 1970s reacted to two important social
movements of that era, civil rights and feminism. In
Planet of the Apes (1968), American astronauts land on
a planet run by apes who have enslaved humans. The
apes see humans as inferior beings with no rights, and
the police apes are significantly darker than the rulers
and scientists. These darker, armed apes can easily be
read as symbols of the black power movement, and their
domination of men (whites) as positive or negative,
depending on the politics of the viewer. To drive home
the film's civil rights subtext, in one scene fire hoses are
turned on unruly humans. Years later in The Brother from
Another Planet (1984) — which is, with John Carpenter's
(b. 1948) They Live! (1988), one of the few progressive
science fiction films of the 1980s — a humanoid black
alien slave fleeing white alien bounty hunters crash lands
in New York City and takes up residence in Harlem.
Taking a more literal approach than Planet of the Apes,
John Sayles uses his black alien character to probe race
relations in contemporary America.

Though criticism of racially motivated injustice has
been allegorized in a number of science fiction films, the
genre has been less progressive in its response to the
feminist movement. In Demon Seed (1977) a woman is
raped by a computer. In Logan's Run (1976), sexual
liberation and the hippie credo "never trust anyone over
thirty" have created an amoral and totalitarian society;
"free love" is clearly shown as a destructive force. In
A Boy and His Dog, a sexually uninhibited woman is
eaten. The men of The Stepford Wives (1975) replace
their troublesome, outspoken wives with docile robots
devoted to housecleaning and sex-on-demand; this male

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Science Fiction

Steven Spielberg. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

chauvinist fantasy is presented in the most negative
terms, and many viewers have interpreted the film as
feminist. In what is probably the most overtly feminist
science fiction film, Born in Flames (1983), women unite
to seize media control after a failed peaceful revolution.
Though less overtly feminist, Liquid Sky (1982) is nota-
ble for its critical representation of sexual relations; aliens
come to Earth looking for heroin but instead get hooked
on the pheromones released by the brain during orgasm.
In extracting the pheromones they kill the orgasmic
individual, but the film's heroine survives each attack
because her lovers are callous (or are simply rapists) and
care nothing about her sexual satisfaction.

Though science fiction films of the 1980s were gen-
erally conservative in their representations of the family
and women. James Cameron's (b. 1954) The Abyss
(1989) offers a perfect example of the punishment and
rehabilitation of the outspoken "bitch" wife, while the
Ripley character from the Alien series is clearly a product
of feminism. First introduced in Ridley Scott's (b. 1937)
Alien (1979), and reappearing in Aliens (1986) and two
more installments in the 1990s, this powerful female
character challenged previous representations of women

in science fiction (and horror and action) cinema. Earlier
women of science fiction were most often docile roman-
tic leads, or occasionally resourceful like Patricia Neale's
character in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Ripley,
though, was consistently strong and smart. The third
Alien film even took a pro-choice stance: denied a meta-
phorical abortion of the alien growing inside of her by
the powerful men who control the corporate future,
Ripley deliberately plunges to her death to defeat them.

SCHOLARLY CRITICISM

Critical writing on science fiction films is generally traced
back to Susan Sontag's 1965 essay "The Imagination of
Disaster," which argued that sci-fi fantasies "normalize
what is psychologically unbearable," the real Cold War
specter of "collective incineration and extinction which
could come at any time, virtually without warning"
(p. 112). Sontag contended that, "the interest of the
films, aside from their considerable amount of cinematic
charm, consists in this intersection between a naive and
largely debased commercial art product and the most
profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation."
What was novel here was that Sontag took the films
seriously as manifestations of cultural consciousness; at
the same time, she poked fun at their hackneyed dialogue
and was dismissive of low-budget productions.

In 1980 Vivian Sobchack's The Limits of Infinity laid
out a rigorous taxonomy of the key audiovisual elements
of science fiction. In 1988 the book was rereleased as
Screening Space, and a new chapter was added applying
postmodern theory to the new wave of science fiction
that followed in the wake of 1977's Star Wars and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. Sobchack is also well
known for her essay "The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex
and the Science Fiction Film," which uses psychoanalytic
theory to consider the repression of sexuality in sci-fi and
the apparent asexuality of most of the male heroes.

First published in 1985, Sobchack's essay was
reprinted in Annette Kuhn's 1990 anthology Alien Zone:
Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema,
a seminal volume that marked the growing scholarly inter-
est in science fiction films. The volume included essays by
J. P. Telotte, Barbara Creed, and Scott Bukatman, who
would publish the influential Terminal Identity: The
Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction in 1993. As
Telotte aptly explains in Science Fiction Film, in Terminal
Identity Bukatman examines films such as Metropolis,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blade Runner, and Tron
(1982) and "suggests that the genre 'narrates the dissolu-
tion of the very ontological structures that we usually take
for granted,' and that in the wake of this 'dissolution' it
offers striking evidence of 'both the end of the subject and

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Science Fiction

a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or
television screen'" (p. 56).

Kuhn's volume also reprinted an important essay by
Constance Penley, "Time Travel, Primal Scene and the
Critical Dystopia," which had first appeared in 1986 in a
special issue of the feminist journal Camera Obscura.
Penley took Freud's primal scene as a template for under-
standing time travel in the mainstream Terminator as well
as in Chris Marker's avant-garde classic La Jetee (1962,
remade as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam in 1995).
The emergence of feminist interest in science fiction was
a striking turn of events, as the genre had long been
considered the terrain of male fans, geeks, and cultists.
If Blade Runner could almost single-handedly take credit
for the postmodernist turn in science fiction criticism, it
was in large part the "monstrous-feminine" (as Barbara
Creed put it) of Alien that inspired feminist interest in
science fiction films in the 1980s and 1990s. Alien
included not only the first female action hero but also a
monster explicitly marked as female, whose motivation
was not world domination, as in the classic "bug-eyed
monster" movies of the 1950s, but rather procreation.
(A similar maternal twist had appeared in a 1967 Star
Trek episode, "The Devil in the Dark")

The early twenty-first century critics most interested in
science fiction can be split into two camps. New media
theorists are less interested in science fiction as a genre per
se than they are in theorizing the cultural impact of new
digital technologies. Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999), for
example, is of interest for its blurring of the boundaries
between digital representation/gaming and reality. The
other dominant strain of critical writing comes from
authors doing ethnographic research on fan cultures. This
research, again, is not always genre specific. Henry Jenkins's
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
included significant work on Star Trek fans, and he con-
tinued the topic with Science Fiction Audiences: Watching
Doctor Who and Star Trek, co-authored with John Tulloch.

SCIENCE FICTION GOES BIG BUDGET

In THX 1138, a gently amplified female voice tells the
tranquilized population to "buy now, buy more." Lucas's
tepid critique of capitalism is ironic, of course, since a
few years later he would reinvent toy licensing, famously
taking a salary cut in exchange for the merchandising
rights for Star Wars. Star Wars was an innocuous film
with no well-known actors and an inflated special effects
budget — a film doomed to fail, most people reasoned,
because everyone knew that science fiction was only for
nerds. Of course, this was really an adventure movie set
in outer space, and it had wide appeal not only to nerds
but also to the cooler set who had never been interested
in science fiction. The film was followed by two sequels.

The third, Return of the Jedi (directed by Richard
Marquand, 1983), was a feel-good movie, while the
second, The Empire Strikes Back (directed by Irvin
Kershner, 1980), was darker and more compelling. As a
character in Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994) explains,
"Empire had the better ending. I mean, Luke gets his
hand cut off, finds out Vader's his father, Han gets frozen
and taken away by Boba Fett. It ends on such a down
note. I mean, that's what life is, a series of down endings.
All Jedi had was a bunch of Muppets."

Following Star Wars, the 1980s saw the decline of
the politically engaged science fiction film. In keeping
with the wider political landscape of the Reagan years,
much 1980s sci-fi turned to love and family values (E T.
The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982; Enemy Mine, 1985; Starman,
1984). Though there were exceptions, like The
Terminator, films such as The Last Starfighter (1984)
celebrated spectacle more than ideas. Notably, The
Running Man (1987) was a spectacular action movie,
but within its visual excess lurked a critique of the gaudy,
exploitative nature of television culture.

Beginning with Paul Verhoeven's RohoCop (1987)
and Total Recall (1990), science fiction became increas-
ingly violent, and began to merge with the action
film. Whereas low-budget science fiction had been com-
mon in the 1950s, 1990s films like Armageddon (1998),
Deep Impact (1998), and Men in Black (1997) wore
their immense budgets on their sleeves and were more
about awing spectators with technological prowess than
provoking thought. Similarly, the return of the Star Wars
franchise with Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom
Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode 11 — Attack of the
Clones (2002) disappointed many fans who would have
liked more character development and fewer video-game
sequences. Notwithstanding the turn towards a big-
budget action aesthetic, social critique has not completely
disappeared from science fiction: The Day Afier
Tomorrow (2004) revisited the ecological themes of the
1960s and 1970s; Gattaca (1997) recalled the nightmares
of totalitarian biological control of the 1970s, merging
them with contemporary fears about genetics; and Code
46 (2003) merged the old theme of population control
with a timely critique of globalization.

Though there seems to be more interest in idea-driven
science fiction films in the twenty-first century, such as the
first Matrix installment, most fans of the genre would agree
that since the 1990s the most provocative sci-fi narratives
have emerged not in theaters but on television in series such
as Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), Babylon 5
(1993-1999), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999).
In keeping with the genre's literary roots, fans of such
programs have produced thousands of their own works
of fiction, as well as videos, which are widely available

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Science Fiction

Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) aligned science fiction with family values. EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

on the Internet. Women have been in the forefront of fan
fiction, producing some of the earliest Star Trek writings and
creating "slash," homoerotic stories originally focused on
Star Trek characters. Though the technology of digital effects
has driven the move toward sci-fi-as-action-cinema, the
technologies of television and the Internet have enabled the
cultivation of the genre, so that in the early twenty-first
century the most creative science fiction is found not on
the big screen but on TV and computer screens.

SEE ALSO Cold War; Disaster Films; Fantasy Films;
Feminism; Genre; Horror Films; Special Effects

FURTHER READING

Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures
Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in
Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993.

Gunning, Tom. The Tilms of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and
Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Kuhn, Annette, ed. Alien Zones: Cultural Theory and

Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London and New
York: Verso, 1990.

, ed. Alien Zone II. London: Verso, 1999.

Penley, Constance, et al., eds. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism,
and Science Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991.

Redmond, Sean. Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader.
London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction
Film. New York: Ungar, 1988.

Sontag, Susan. "The Imagination of Disaster." Gregg Rickman,
ed. The Science Fiction Film Reader. New York: Limelight
Editions, 2004.

Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge, UK and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences:
Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek. London and New York:
Routledge, 1995.

Heather Hendershot

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SCREENWRITING

Screenwriting involves all writing "for the screen." Given
the history of the screen, such a category covers both
fiction and documentary films since the early 1900s in
the United States and throughout the world as well as
work for television, video, and, in recent years, the
Internet. In the beginning of film, there were no screen-
plays. In fact, one does not need a screenplay to make a
movie. Technically, one simply needs a camera and film or
a digital camera, and certainly since the first days of
moving images down to "Reality TV" in recent times,
there are those who specialize in using nonscripted
approaches to film. But the moment fiction or narrative
cinema lasting more than a few minutes began to become
common, there came the realization that, as for the stage,
so for film, actors and directors needed to know the story,
the dialogue, and the action for the tales being told.

Script credits exist for most silent films, but as
biographies, autobiographies, and studies of the period
have revealed, few of these films had hard and fast scripts
written by someone called a screenwriter. In many of his
shorts, such as The Haunted House (1921), The Boat
(1921), The Playhouse (1921), The Paleface (1922), and
Cops (1922), Buster Keaton (1895-1966) is listed as
co-screenwriter with his friend Edward F. Cline
(1892-1961). It was not until the coming of sound in
film, however, that writers began to call themselves screen-
writers, having to write not only action but dialogue as
well.

THE CLASSICAL AMERICAN SCREENPLAY

The acknowledgment of the art and craft of the screen-
play, happily, was apparent from the beginning of the

Academy Award® Oscars® in 1928, which virtually coin-
cided with the introduction of sound and dialogue
in cinema. Also important from the first Oscars® down
to the present, the Academy has understood the impor-
tance of two distinct award categories for screenwriting:
Best Original Screenplay, the first award going to one of
the giants of early screenwriting, Ben Hecht (1894—
1964), for Underworld (1927), and Best Adaptation.
The first Oscar® for Adaptation was given in 1931 to
Howard Estabrook (1884—1978) for Cimarron, based on
Edna Ferber's novel.

As screen historians have noted, it was no accident
that once sound films began, Hollywood rushed to entice
Broadway playwrights and American novelists to move to
Beverly Hills and Los Angeles. Ben Hecht was a well
respected playwright before he moved to California. He
wrote the stage play The Front Page, with Charles
MacArthur (1895-1956), which became the hit film of
1 93 1 , ironically written from stage to screen by two other
writers, Bartlett Cormack (1898-1942) and Charles
Lederer (1911-1976). The list of Broadway playwrights
and noted American novelists who went to Hollywood is
a long one. It includes everyone from Sydney Howard
(1885-1956), whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play, They
Knew What They Wanted (1924), was made into three
different films, and Preston Sturges (1898-1959), who
became the first ever to have the credit "written and
directed by" on the screen (for The Great McGinty,
1940, for which he received the Oscar®). It also included
Robert E. Sherwood, who won an Oscar® for The Best
Years of Our Lives (1946). Others, such as Dudley
Nichols (1895-1960), writer of award-winning hits
including The Informer (1935, Oscar®), Bringing Up

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screenwriting

DUDLEY NICHOLS

b. Wapakoneta, Ohio, 6 April 1895, d. 4 January 1960

Dudley Nichols was one of the most variously talented
and durable of Hollywood screenwriters throughout the
1930s and 1940s, winning an Oscar® for John Ford's The
Informer (1935, adapted from Liam O'Flaherty's novel
and co-written with Ford). In a career spanning thirty
years and over sixty feature films, he proved a master of
genres from westerns to screwball and romantic comedies
to historical dramas and swashbuckling adventure films.

Coming to screenwriting from journalism, Nichols
began as sound films became the norm in 1930. He worked
with director John Ford on Born Reckless (1930) and went
on to do eleven more scripts for Ford. His professionalism
can be seen in his ability to handle adaptations and to work
as a partner with other writers. Stagecoach (1939) stands out
as one of Hollywood's best films. Nichols's script for the
film, based on a story by Ernest Haycox, moved the western
from a "B" category to the "A" list.

Nichols was aware of how easily a Hollywood writer
could become a nameless cog in a near-mechanical
production line. Some critics have accused Nichols of
pretentiousness in some of his scripts, such as the one for
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), an adaptation of Ernest
Hemingway's novel. Some have blamed his flaws on
Nichols's talent for writing on demand for directors.
Certainly there is truth to the fact that by writing three to
four scripts a year, quality often suffered. Yet in 1945, for
instance, Nichols wrote three fine scripts for films by three
different directors: Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Nichols's
adaptation-remake of Jean Renoir's La Chienne {The Bitch,
1931); Leo McCarey's The Bells of St. Mary's, a fetching
sequel to McCarey's Going My Way (1944) that proved
Nichols's gift for building on someone else's vision; and
Rene Clair's And Then There Were None, based on Agatha
Christie's long-running stage play. Nichols also directed
three of his own scripts, Government Girl (1943); Sister

Kenny (1946); and Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), an
adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play.

Nichols's journalistic background helped him to bring
out both a strong sense of character developed in conflict —
whether be that comedy or drama — and to develop an eye
for the telling details that humanize his protagonists and
avoid cliches. The Informer, for example, demonstrates
Nichols's ability to open up the darker side of human
nature as he brought the starving and troubled Gypo Nolan
(Victor McLaglen) into sympathetic focus in this tale of the
Irish Revolution of 1922. His films tend to be morality
plays, which champion a liberal perspective. Also an
occasional director, Nichols ended his career with a number
of interesting westerns and adventure scripts, including The
Tin Star (1957), Heller in Pink Tights (1960), and Run for
the Sun (1956), a variation of The Most Dangerous Game.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Born Reckless (1930), The Lost Patrol (1934), Judge Priest

(1934) , Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), The Informer

(1935) , Bringing Up Baby (1938), Stagecoach (1939),
Swamp Water (1941), Government Girl (1943), This Land
Is Mine (1943), The Fugitive (1947), The Big Sky (1952),
The Tin Star (1957), The Hangman (1959)

FURTHER READING

Ford, John, and Dudley Nichols. Stagecoach. New York:
Faber & Faber, 1988.

Gallagher, Tad. John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986.

Nichols, Dudley. Air Force. Edited by Lawrence H. Suid.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

. "The Writer and the Film." In Twenty Best Film

Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, xxxi—
xi. New York: Crown, 1943.

Renoir, Jean, and Dudley Nichols. This Land Is Mine. New
York: Ungar, 1985.

Andrew Horton

Baby (1938), and Stagecoach (1939), became well known
from the beginning of their careers as screenwriters.

Hollywood also drew in overseas writing talent,
including writer-director Billy Wilder (1906-2002)
from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who arrived in
1934 and whose teamwork with I. A. L. Diamond
(1920-1988) produced the Oscar® -winning scripts for

The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Apartment (1960) as
well as nominated scripts for Sunset Boulevard (1950)
and Some Like It Hot (1959). It is perhaps difficult to
imagine how rich the cross-section of writers in Los
Angeles was during the 1930s through the 1940s, when
the "classical American screenplay" came to have its
distinct form and substance.

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Screenwriting

Dudley Nichols on the set of Sister Kenny (1946). EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

The term "classical American screenplay" suggests
that during this early sound period and through
Hollywood's "golden age," both the profession and the
form-format for screenwriting became set within certain
guidelines and genres simply because the studio system
demanded, consciously and unconsciously, a certain
sense of both regularity and predictability given the large
budgets, the strict timetables for production, and the
need to systematize the whole process. To be more
specific, this "classic American screenplay" is a narrative
focused on a main protagonist (or protagonists) in either
dramatic or comic conflict that, by the film's end,
has been resolved, usually with the main character
having learned something and grown in the process.
Furthermore, the main characters are almost always sym-
pathetic to one degree or another, particularly because
they are in some way vulnerable rather than perfect, even
if they are heroic. Thus Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in
Casablanca (1942) seems to have an ordered existence
running Rick's Place in Casablanca while World War II
rages in Europe, but the conflict comes when his old
flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) walks through the door and
we realize he has never gotten over the breakup of their
relationship. The main story becomes resolving the

unfinished business of their past love in Paris, and Rick
finally learns that love means the issues are much larger
than those of personal romance. He proves his love by
urging that she leave with her husband to continue fight-
ing the Nazis.

Almost every book on screenwriting — and the num-
ber of them has grown into the hundreds — emphasizes
that the basic screenplay is "Aristotelian" — that is, based
on following a protagonist through a conflict with a
beginning (statement of the conflict), middle (develop-
ment of dealing with the conflict), and ending (resolu-
tion). Many script instructors, including Lew Hunter,
the former chairman of the Screenwriting Department of
the University of California at Los Angeles, emphasize
"classical" structure as put forth by Lajos Egri in his
1942 book, How To Write A Play (revised in 1946 as
The Art of Dramatic Writing). This basic structure of
storytelling holds true for every genre in Hollywood
cinema. For example, in comedy-dramas such as Frank
Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946), George Bailey
(James Stewart) faces personal and financial problems
in his small town that lead him to consider suicide. But a
"vision" of his town and family without him leads Bailey
to finally accept his own life and the love of his family in
a glorious conclusion in this script by Frances Goodrich,
Albert Hackett, and Capra based on a story by Philip
Van Doren Stern.

PARTNERS AND TEAMS

Because over the years Hollywood has developed as a
highly organized business, screenplays fairly swiftly began
to take on a format that by the end of the 1930s became
quite systematized and that by now can be created with
computerized programs such as Final Draft or Movie
Magic. Briefly stated, the standard American script is
under 120 pages in length, with the guideline being
that "one page equals one minute of screen time."
Description is kept to a minimum, with very little in
way of camera direction since that is the director's job.
A script consists of brief description and dialogue and
both are written to be a "good read," as they say in
Hollywood. The DreamWorks script copy of Shrek
(2001), for instance, which is based on the book by
William Steig and a script by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio,
Joe Stillman, and Roger S. H. Schulman, describes the
Princess on page one as "lovely" and contains no descrip-
tion of Shrek except for the mention of his "large green
hand."

Other "regulations" include ones stipulating there
be "no photos or graphics" in scripts and that they must
be printed on three-holed paper with two metal brats
holding the script together. Beginning screenwriters
are always told that "Everyone is looking for reasons

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screenwriting

not to read your script," so violations of these "rules" can
lead to a script being tossed or recycled.

While format was becoming more regularized
throughout the 1930s and 1940s, it was also becoming
the rule that seldom were Hollywood scripts penned by
one author from start to finish. Many writers formed
lasting script partnerships, as in the case of Wilder and
Diamond. Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris, for
instance, produced a string of hits from Trading Places
(1983) and Twins (1988, with William Davies and
William Osborne also credited) to Space Jam (1996, with
Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick writing as well), work-
ing together five days a week for years. Poetry does not
lend itself easily to multiple authorship, but there is
something about bouncing ideas off one another that
works in collaborative screenwriting.

Even Casablanca, instead of being a single-authored
work like a novel, short story, or poem, was written
through a very complex series of versions and events, by
Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, together with Howard
Koch (1902—1995). "Contributions" came from Aeneas
MacKenzie and Hal Wallis, "among others," and the
script was "adapted" from an unpublished play,
"Everybody Comes to Rick's," by Murray Burnett and
Joan Alison.

As script instructors everywhere say to students of
the craft every day with a smile:

If you are not willing to see your screenplay as a
blueprint that may be redone at any time and by
one or more other writers, then you should not
go into screenwriting at all for nobody ever paid
to go into a movie theater to watch a screenplay.
It is only part of a long process to make a film.

Therein lies the excitement and the disappointment of
this craft that is less than 150 years old and the reason
why many writers have been frustrated by their
Hollywood experiences.

Because of the complexities of the long road from
idea to final film, the Writers Guild of America often
becomes an indispensable player. Founded in 1933, the
Guild built on similar organizations such as the
Dramatists Guild in New York to form a service union
that would help negotiate credits and rights for screen-
writers. Clearly the goal has always been to elevate the
status of screenwriters and the public's and the producers'
awareness of their importance. While it is possible to
make a film with no script, the point of a business like
Hollywood, which involves increasingly larger amounts
of money, is that all those involved want to see what the
project is about, and so there is a need for scripts as a
genesis for all that follows.

The original agreement put forth beginning in
1940 stated that contracts with Guild members must
give screen credit to "the one (1), two (2), or at most
three (3) writers, or two (2) teams, chiefly responsible
for the completed work," and in addition that these
designated writers "will be the only writers to receive
screen play credit." Often the situation is not so simple,
however, and so each year the WGA (www.wga.org)
receives over two hundred cases that it arbitrates to
determine who receives screen credit. The Guild is a
valuable service for its several thousand members and
the more than fifty thousand scripts that are registered
with it each year.

ORIGINAL FILMS VERSUS ADAPTATIONS,
REMAKES, AND SEQUELS

It should come as no surprise that in Hollywood more
scripts are adaptations than original scripts from clearly
original ideas. Because Hollywood has always been a
business, the fact that a book or a play or even a television
show has been popular certainly spurs on producers to
say, "Let's make the movie!" The year 2003 even saw the
"adaptation" of an amusement park ride into a hit movie
{Pirates of the Caribbean) and similarly with a video game
{Resident Evil). In such a manner, Gone with the Wind
(1939) moved from the pages of Margaret Mitchell's
best-selling novel to the screen in an Oscar®-winning
script by Sidney Howard and others. The list is endless
and the formula of "page to screen" might seem quite
mechanical were it not for the fact that there are so many
variations in the adaptation process.

One form of adaptation that French filmmakers in
particular have come to hate is the transformation of a
foreign hit into a Hollywood film to spare Americans
from reading subtitles. Jean-Luc Godard's breakthrough
New Wave film A bout de souffle {Breathless, 1960)
became the inferior Breathless (1983), with Richard
Gere reprising the Jean-Paul Belmondo role. Mike
Nichols's The Birdcage (1996), with a script by Elaine
May, is hardly a memorable "American" film compared
to the original French-Italian comedy, La Cage Aux Folks
{Birds of a Feather, 1978), but its box office receipts were
more than twenty times those of the original.

Another form of adaptation is the remake. Nothing
could be sounder business sense than the idea that "if it
made money years ago, let's give it another chance."
Robin Hood (1922), with Douglas Fairbanks (1883—
1939) as star and screenwriter, has spawned almost a
dozen remakes from Robin and Marian (1976) and
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) to parodies such
as Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), with Mel Brooks
writing (with several others) and directing.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screenwriting

Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood, 1943), adapted by Dudley Nichols from Ernest
Hemingway's novel. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

In yet another form of adaptation screenwriting, the
original is the source or an inspiration for the screen-
writer, but the actual script and even the title differ from
the original. This allows the writer to riff with the mate-
rial, much like jazz artists know the tune but play with it
to express their interpretation of a song. The Coen
brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) was nomi-
nated for an Oscar® for such an adaptation, since it is
playfully based on Homer's Odyssey, while the title is
taken with a wink from Preston Sturges's Sullivan's
Travels (1941), which concerns a Hollywood director of
comedies, Sullivan, who wishes to make a serious movie
to be called "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Finally, sequels (and, in some cases, prequels) sug-
gest yet a further territory for the screenplay "based on
previous films" yet forging ahead with new material.
Examples include the Star Wars, Batman, and The

Terminator series as well as The Godfather (1972, with a
script Oscar® for writer-director Francis Ford Coppola
[b. 1939] and Mario Puzo [1920-1999], author of the
original novel), The Godfather, Part II (script by Coppola
and Puzo, 1974), and The Godfather, Part III (again,
Coppola and Puzo, 1990). The motive is once more that
of capitalizing on one hit by trying to duplicate it, by
simply extending the story, characters, and even the
themes, providing "familiarity with a difference," in a
manner not unlike genre films. In a sense, such a concept
for cinema pulls the screenwriter into the territory of
television series writing, with its problem of making each
episode of a show recognizable yet somehow original
as well.

Original screenplays, however, have always been in
play, and they are especially worth celebrating. Callie
Khouri won an Oscar® for her first script, Thelma and

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screenwriting

PADDY CHAYEFSKY
b. Sidney Aaron Chayefsky, New York, New York, 29 January 1923, d. 1 August 1981

Three-time Oscar®-winning screenwriter Paddy
Chayefsky was equally well known as a playwright,
novelist, composer, and producer. He had a fine ear for
dialogue and an ability to use all media from radio and
television to the stage and cinema to explore social issues
and to question political and cultural stereotypes.

A graduate of the City College of New York, a semi-
pro football player for the Kingsbridge Trojans in the
Bronx, and a Purple Heart-winning soldier in World War
II, Chayefsky began his creative work as a playwright in
England while recovering from wounds sustained in the
war. Throughout the 1950s his work for the stage,
television, and then the cinema grew out of his own finely
etched stories based on his youth in New York City. As
Young As You Feel (1951), a story of a printing company
employee who does not want to retire at age sixty-five, was
the first film based on one of his stories.

In the television play Marty (1953), Rod Steiger
brought to life Chayefsky's touching tale of a Bronx
butcher who finds love unexpectedly. Considered the
golden boy of television during its golden age, Chayefsky
also wrote film scripts. The 1955 film version of Marty,
directed by Delbert Mann and starring Ernest Borgnine
and Betsy Blair, won Chayefsky his first Oscar®, along
with Oscars® for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best
Actor.

Dividing his energy between Broadway and
Hollywood, Chayefsky went on to shape film scripts. His
Oscar®-nominated script for The Goddess (1958), about
Marilyn Monroe's complex and finally tragic hunger for
stardom, created tight, effective dialogue that thrust actress
Kim Stanley, performing in her first film role, into the
spotlight. Perhaps because of his natural feel for both stage
and screen, actors thrived in the well-defined characters

Chayefsky created. James Garner claims that his favorite
film was The Americanization of Emily ( 1 964) , which co-
starred Julie Andrews as the love interest for Garner's
World War II American soldier character. The sharply
written script still rings true today as a delightful "battle of
the sexes" in the tradition of edgy romantic comedy, while
at the same time, Chayefsky's social criticism provides a
strong antiwar message.

In the 1970s Chayefsky moved away from dramas of
social realism and experimented with darker humor and
broader satire in The Hospital (1971, his second Oscar®)
and Network (1976, his third Oscar®). Altered States
(1980), based on his own novel, was his last script, but
Chayefsky was so upset with the finished film that he
withdrew his name from the credits when his sense of
characterization became lost in the film's "mind-bending"
special effects.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Marty (1955), The Bachelor Party (1957) , The Goddess (1958),
The Americanization of Emily ( 1 964) , The Hospital (1971),
Network (1976)

FURTHER READING

Brady, John. "Paddy Chayefsky." In The Craft of the

Screenwriter. New York: Touchstone Books, 1981: 29—83.

Chayefsky, Paddy. Altered States: A Novel. New York: Harper
& Row, 1978.

-. The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The

Television Plays, the Stage Plays, the Screenplays.
Edited by Arthur Schlesinger. New York: Applause Books,

1995.

Chum, John. Paddy Chayefsky. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Considine, Shaun. Mad As Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy
Chayefiky. New York: Random House, 1994.

Andrew Horton

Louise (1991), which came from a combination of her
imagination and her experiences. Similarly, the long list
of Oscars® for original scripts is an impressive one,
including, to mention but a few, John Huston's The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), William Inge's
Splendor in the Grass (1961), William Rose's Guess
Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), William Goldman's
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Robert

Towne's Chinatown (1974), John Briley's Gandhi
(1982), Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), and Alan
Ball's American Beauty (1999).

THE POLITICS OF SCREENWRITING

The darkest period in American screenwriting was cer-
tainly during the anticommunist scare period following
World War II and into the 1950s. In 1947 the House

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Screenwriting

Paddy Chayefsky. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began
hearings that brought in "friendly" Hollywood individ-
uals who began testifying about "Communist" influences
being introduced into films by certain filmmakers and
writers. The result of the hearings in Washington, D.C.,
was the creation of an informal Hollywood blacklist of
writers and directors who were not to be hired.
Particularly prominent on this list were the Hollywood
Ten, which included Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976),
Ring Lardner Jr. (1885-1933), and Michael Wilson
(1914-1978), but it affected many more, including
Jules Dassin (b. 1911), Bernard Gordon (b. 1918),
Maurice Rapf (1914-2003), and Walter Bernstein
(b. 1919), who later managed something of a comic
revenge with a splendid script for Martin Ritt's The
Front (1976), which treats the story of the way many
producers used "front" writers to cover for actual black-
listed writers who were secretly still writing. For many, it
was a long battle to gain their rightful credits on scripts
written "under cover." Trumbo received credit after the
blacklist period for films such as Roman Holiday (1953)
and The Brave One (1957), while Michael Wilson
(1914—1976) won credit, after his death, for his scripts
for Friendly Persuasion (1956), The Bridge on the River
Kwai (1957), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

Many memorable films have been made as low-
budget, independent projects based on scripts that take
chances and purposely break the so-called rules of
Hollywood screenwriting. Steven Soderbergh's debut fea-
ture as writer-director, sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
walked off with the top Cannes Festival prize as a film
with almost no sex but lots of lies, very good dialogue,
and character shading much in the tradition of French
films of the 1950s and 1960s. Shot in Soderbergh's home
state of Louisiana rather than in Hollywood, the film's
sharply written script pointed the way not only for the
Sundance Film Festival in future years but for the multi-
tude of independents that followed. Quentin Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction (co-written with Roger Avary, 1994), for
instance, breaks up the classical narrative of following a
main protagonist through a basically chronological story
to its resolution by mixing together several narratives
with intersecting characters but told in jumbled time
frames, so that by film's end, when Vincent Vega (John
Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) "dance" out of
the diner, viewers must remember that this "conclusion"
in fact takes place earlier, as Vincent is already dead.

In recent years, the line between a clearly independ-
ent script and a Hollywood-supported project has
become blurred. A collaborative effort such as Ang
Lee's Wo hu cang long {Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, 2000) is a special mixture of Hollywood and
foreign, independent, and Hong Kong kung fu, all
blended into a memorable script and film. Based on a
novel by Du Lu Wang, the script was written by
American screenwriter and co-producer James Schamus
and Hui-Ling Wang from Taiwan, who had previously
written Yin shi nan nu {Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994)
together. But also on the project was Taiwanese screen-
writer Kuo Jung Tsai, whom Schamus never met while
writing.

EUROPEAN SCREENWRITING AND BEYOND

Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) used to like saying that his
films had a beginning, middle, and end, but not neces-
sarily in that order. Although popular cinema in
France and Italy, for example, had recognized screen-
writers critically, such a playful and eclectic approach to
screenwriting and filmmaking as suggested by Godard's
comment has traditionally characterized the more per-
sonal cinemas of many nations of Europe and elsewhere.
What became known as the "auteur theory" was simply
an acknowledgment of a European film tradition wherein
filmmakers thought of themselves as the complete
"author" of the film, from script to final cut. While
writers calling themselves screenwriters emerged in
Hollywood as early as the late 1920s, there were few
European filmmakers or writers who would call

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screenwriting

themselves "screenwriters." In contrast to Hollywood,
where few have ever been both writers and directors on
the same film, in Europe and other countries around the
world, the "double-duty" position of writer-director has
been the norm. The advantage of the auteur approach is
that films get made with a consistent vision and with a
minimum of interference from teams of writers, pro-
ducers, and others. Thus an Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)
film such as Det Sjunde inseglet {The Seventh Seal, 1957)
or Trollflojten {The Magic Flute, 1975) is easily recogniz-
able as a "Bergman film" because of his control from
page to screen in all aspects of filmmaking. And Francois
Truffaut's (1932-1984) films became recognizable as
"Truffaut films" because of his consistent themes and
characters, even when he only cowrote a script as in Jules
et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962).

But even with auteurs there are variations, as with
those auteurs who actually liked to write with a team or
partner. La Dolce Vita (1960), for instance, was written
by director Federico Fellini (1920-1993) and three script
friends: Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi, and Ennio
Flaiano. Furthermore, many European practices would
be unheard of under WGA standards and contracts for
assigning screen credit. The Greek filmmaker-screen-
writer Theo Angelopoulos (b. 1935) likes to share story
ideas with the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra
(b. 1920) and sometimes others, even if they do not
actually write the script but simply write notes or give
advice and feedback.

The differences between Hollywood scripts and
those of Europe and other countries over the years should
be acknowledged as well. Ingmar Bergman's scripts read
more like short stories than scripts, for he knew he was
writing for himself, and thus the script was more like an
outline; he knew he would figure out later what he
wanted for lighting, sets, and actors' performances.

One reason for the rigid and set format and look of
the Hollywood script is that it is the result of negotiation
between many people, who in some cases may not even
know each other. By writing a script with his novelist
friend, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), for Ostre sledovane
vlaky {Closely Observed Trains, 1966), based on Hrabal's
novel, Jin Menzel (b. 1938) of Czechoslovakia avoided
what most young American screenwriters must do: write
so that complete strangers "get" your story, characters,
and themes.

Many independent scripts seem more like
Hollywood offshoots than risk-taking, innovative works.
But there are certainly thousands of scripts written by
individuals throughout the country and the world who
have taken workshops such as those given by Syd Field
and Robert McKee or have attended script conferences
such as those in Austin, Texas, and Santa Fe, New

Mexico, as well as in Hollywood (the Hollywood Film
Festival, for instance, at www.hollywoodfilmfestival.com).
A variety of online script courses (such as UCLA's
www.filmprograms.ucla.edu) and Web sites exist that
are dedicated to help "pitch" and list scripts and to
inform writers about what producers are looking for.
An ever-growing number of screenwriting magazines
offer to help the independent and aspiring screenwriter,
including Screentalk (www.screentalk.biz) and Scr(i)pt
(www. scriptmag.com).

The hundreds of books on screenwriting that now
exist have become quite specialized. Noah Lukeman's
book is summarized by its title, The First Five Pages,
while Thomas Pope's Good Scripts Bad Scripts is subtitled
Learning the Craft of Screenwriting Through 25 of the Best
and Worst Films in History, Other books on screenwriting
include Erik Joseph's How to Enter Screenplay Contests
and Win and Max Adams's The Screenwriter's Survival
Guide.

Despite these numerous guides, it is ultimately the
quality of the script that counts. No one has summed up
the importance of screenwriting better than the Japanese
director Akira Kurosawa: "With a good script, a good
director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script,
a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a
bad script even a good director can't possibly make a
good film" (p. 193).

SEE ALSO Adaptation; Auteur Theory and Authorship;
Direction; Production Process; Sequels, Series, and
Remakes; Studio System

FURTHER READING

Egri, Lajos. The Art of Dramatic Writing. New York: Touchstone,
1960.

Engel, Joel. Screenwriters on Screenwriting: The Best in the Business
Discuss Their Craft. New York: Hyperion, 1995.

Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New
York: Delacorte, 1982.

Friend, Tad, "Credit Grab: How Many Writers Does It Take to
Make a Movie?" New Yorker, 20 October 2003: 160-169.

Froug, William. New Screenwriter Looks at the New Screenwriter.
Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1992.

Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal
View of Hollywood and Screenwriting. New York: Warner,
1983.

Gordon, Bernard. Hollywood Exile, or, How I Learned to Love
the Blacklist: A Memoir. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1999.

Horton, Andrew. Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay.

1994. Updated and expanded edition. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.

Hunter, Lew. Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434. New York:
Perigree, 1994.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screenwriting

Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like An Autobiography. New York:

Vintage Books, 1983.
McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and

the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: ReganBooks,

1997.

Seger, Linda. Making a Good Script Great. Hollywood, CA:
Samuel French, 1988.

Sturges, Preston. Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges. Edited by
Andrew Horton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in the New Hollywood:

Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Andrew Horton

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SCREWBALL COMEDY

In the mid- 1930s a new film genre, screwball comedy,
arose in American cinema. Based upon the old "boy-
meets-girl" formula turned topsy-turvy, it generally pre-
sented the eccentric, female-dominated courtship of an
upper-class couple. Archetypal examples include Bringing
Up Baby (1938) and its loose remake, What's Up, Doc?
(1972). The birth of this approach, which might also be
labeled "new American farce," was due to developments
that occurred in the early 1930s.

ORIGINS

Screwball comedy was tied to a period of transition in
American humor that gained momentum by the late
1920s. The dominant comedy character had been the
capable cracker-barrel type, such as Will Rogers; it now
became an antihero, best exemplified by characters in The
New Yorker writings of Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
and James Thurber (1894-1961), or Leo McCarey's
(1898-1969) silent comedy shorts with Laurel and
Hardy. (McCarey would later direct the screwball classic
The Awful Truth, 1937). Antiheroic humor is driven by
the ritualistic humiliation of the male; screwball comedy
merely dresses up the setting and substitutes beautiful
people for this farcical battle of the sexes.

The Great Depression fueled the antiheroic nature of
the screwball genre. Moviegoers looked to the movies as a
means of lighthearted escape from their everyday
worries. Coupled with this was the Depression-era fasci-
nation with the upper classes, which is still a component
of the genre, as in the wealthy backdrop of Four Weddings
and a Funeral (1994). Moreover, screwball plotlines
sometimes pair couples from different classes, as in

Frank Capra's (1897-1991) watershed work, It
Happened One Night (1934), in which a blue-collar
reporter (Clark Gable) and a runaway heiress (Claudette
Colbert) squabble but eventually fall in love. This
romance becomes a metaphor for various forms of rec-
onciliation, be it romantic or generational. Garry
Marshall updated many of these components in his
1999 salute to the genre, Runaway Bride, which featured
both a reporter (Richard Gere) and a woman with com-
mitment issues (Julia Roberts). Similarly, writer and
director Steve Gordon (b. 1938) brilliantly focuses on
the genre's occasional union of classes in Arthur (1981),
with a billionaire (Dudley Moore) falling for a waitress
(Liza Minnelli).

Hollywood's implementation of the Production
Code in 1934 also affected screwball comedy. This same
year saw the release of such pioneering examples of the
genre as Howard Hawks's (1896—1977) Twentieth
Century and It Happened One Night. Since American
censorship has always been more concerned with sexual-
ity than with violence, it hardly seems a coincidence that
a genre sometimes referred to as "the sex comedy without
sex" should blossom at the same time the code appeared.

A fourth period factor was the film industry's then
recent embrace of sound technology. Whereas silent com-
edy keyed upon the solo-hero status of personality come-
dians such as Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) and Buster
Keaton (1895-1966), talking pictures were geared toward
the verbal interaction of doubled heroes, such as the screw-
ball couple. Even the early sound personality comedian
films had a multiple-hero interaction, with the 1930s
being the heyday of comedy teams from the celebrated
Marx Brothers to period favorites such as Wheeler and

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screwball Comedy

CARY GRANT

b. Archibald Alexander Leach, Bristol, England, 18 January 1904, d. 29 November 1986

Cary Grant put his stamp on screwball comedy like no
other performer. In the genre's heyday he seemed to
appear in every other watershed film. These classics
include The Awful Truth and Topper (both 1937), Holiday
and Bringing Up Baby (both 1938), His Girl Friday
(1939), and My Favorite Wife (1940). Moreover, in the
post— World War II era, when screwball comedy was less
frequently produced, he starred in two excellent revisionist
examples of the genre directed by one of the major
directors of screwball comedy, Howard Hawks: / Was a
Male War Bride (1949) and Monkey Business (1952). In
the formulaic world of screwball comedy, Grant remains
the genre's only indispensable actor.

The Grant screwball comedy persona was a product
of his ability to combine great physical and visual comedic
skills with the more traditional characteristics of the
leading man. Here was something unique — a visual
comedian who was tall, dark, and handsome, and who had
a pleasant speaking voice. It is a generally ignored fact that
the boy Archie Leach (Cary Grant) began his
entertainment career as an acrobatic comic in the music
halls and variety theaters of England. This was an early
training ground not unlike that experienced by one of
Grant's favorite comedians — Charlie Chaplin. Still, the
suave Grant brought a touch of class to slapstick. And
conversely, just as he elevated low comedy, the physical
shtick gave him a touch of the everyman. One cannot
emphasize enough the attractiveness of Grant's double-
edged screwball persona.

The finishing touch on Grant's comedy persona came
courtesy of pivotal screwball director Leo McCarey and
the making of The Awful Truth. McCarey's storytelling
actions were so infectious that the performers often ended
up aping the director. Grant's screen penchant for
everything from flirtatiously self-deprecating humor to the

amusingly expressive use of his hands and eyes were all
signature trademarks of McCarey long before they became
synonymous with the actor; Grant brought the quizzical
cocked head, the eye-popping expressions, the forward
lunge of surprise, inspired double takes, and an athletic
agility to the McCarey character.

While McCarey molded the Grant screwball persona,
director Howard Hawks maximized the actor's gifts to the
genre in Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male
War Bride, and Monkey Business. Hawks's one addition to
the Grant screwball shtick was the absentminded professor
demeanor. But the succinct take on Grant's screwball
success remains that combination of movie-star good looks
and a flair for being funny.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Topper (1937), The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby

(1938) , Holiday (1938), Only Angels Have Wings

(1939) , His Girl Friday (1939), The Philadelphia Story

(1940) , My Favorite Wife (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace
(1944), Notorious (1946), Mr. Blandings Builds His
Dream House (1948), / Was a Male War Bride (1949),
Monkey Business (1952), To Catch a Thief (1955),
North by Northwest (1959), Operation Petticoat (1959),
Charade (1963)

FURTHER READING

Britton, Andrew. "Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire."

CineAction!7 (December 1986): 36-51.
Gehring, Wes D. Leo McCarey: "From Marx to McCarthy."

Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004.

Kael, Pauline. "The Man from Dream City." The New Yorker

(July 14 1975): 40+.
Nelson, Nancy. Evenings with Cary Grant. New York:

Morrow, 1991.
Schickel, Richard. Cary Grant: A Celebration. Boston: Little,

Brown, 1983.

Wes D. Gehring

Woolsey and the Ritz Brothers. The extension of these
manic comedy teams also influenced screwball comedy. A
defining trait of the screwball couple was having them act
more like broad comedians. They were sophisticates gone
silly. Pioneering examples of the sexy but clowning screw-
ball couple include John Barrymore (1882-1942) and
Carole Lombard (1908-1942), interacting in zany slap-

stick situations in Hawks's benchmark Twentieth Century,
and Gable and Colbert, pretending to be an argumentative
married couple in It Happened One Night.

Yet another catalyst in the 1930s for screwball com-
edy was the genre's marriage of directors trained in silent
comedy to the army of wordsmiths who descended
upon Hollywood with the coming of sound. Journalists,

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screwball Comedy

Cary Grant at the time of That Touch of Mink (Delbert
Mann, 1962). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

playwrights, novelists, humorists, and every other kind of
writer found at least a temporary California home as the
film capital panicked over the sudden importance of
words. All this talent helped usher in a golden age of
dialogue comedy. Frequently these writers fed on their
journalistic past. Thus a good number of screwball com-
edies have a newspaper backdrop, from the studio era's It
Happened One Night, Nothing Sacred (1937), and His
Girl Friday (1940) to Runaway Bride.

Screwball comedy's wittiest dialogue was the product
of former Broadway playwright Preston Sturges (1898-
1959), the writer and director of such watershed exam-
ples of the genre as The Lady Eve (1941) and The Palm
Beach Story (1942). But he was also a student of slapstick,
which made him a perfect auteur for a farcical genre
defined by both verbal wit and visual comedy. Sturges
notwithstanding, most of the key screwball directors,
such as McCarey and Hawks, received their cinematic
start in silent pictures. Indeed, McCarey's motto was "do
it visually." Consequently, the sight gag (from a facial
expression to a fall) was a natural component of the
screwball comedy arsenal.

RELATIONSHIPS AND GENDER

Screwball comedy is often confused with romantic com-
edy, but while the two genres share some elements,
screwball comedy is a parody of romantic comedy.
Romantic comedy's earnestness regarding love, as found
in the impassioned conclusions of When Harry Met
Sally. . . (1989) and As Good As It Gets (1997), is entirely
absent from screwball comedy. Such sentiments would
immediately be subject to satirical rebuke. For example,
in the screwball What's Up, Doc?, the traditional love
interest (Madeline Kahn) observes, "As the years go by,
romance fades, and something else takes its place. Do
you know what that is?" The devastatingly funny put-
down from her fiance (Ryan O'Neal, star of the earlier
Love Story [1970], no less), is "Senility." The screwball
genre always accents the silly over the sentimental. For
instance, in the noteworthy My Man Godfrey (1936), the
first period film to rate the screwball label, Carole
Lombard decides that William Powell's having put her
in the shower fully dressed is the height of romance, and
she next proceeds to jump up and down on her bed,
joyfully spraying water everywhere.

Avoiding serious and/or melodramatic overtones
(such as in Love Affair [1939] and Sleepless in Seattle
[1993]), screwball comedy instead shows irreverence for
love and an assortment of other topics, including itself.
The Awful Truth and Nothing Scared both burlesque
scenes from Capra's populist romance Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town (1936), which is sometimes wrongly labeled a
screwball comedy. In Twentieth Century John Barrymore
spoofs his "Great Profile" with a putty nose, while Cary
Grant mocks his real name (Archie Leach) in His Girl
Friday. And at the close of What's Up, Doc? Ryan O'Neal
ridicules the romantic drivel, "Love means never having
to say you're sorry," the tag line from Love Story.

Coupled with this affectionate parody are occasional
patches of more biting satire, such as Ben Hecht's fre-
quent comic diatribes against journalism in his Nothing
Sacred script, or onetime lawyer McCarey derailing the
courtroom in both The Awful Truth and My Favorite
Wife (1940). Joining journalism and law as an especially
popular screwball satirical target, is academia and intellec-
tual pretension; the "dean" of this approach is Howard
Hawks, with his winning trilogy Bringing Up Baby, Ball
of Fire (1941), and Monkey Business (1952). Other skew-
ered subjects include the upper class, in My Man Godfrey;
Las Vegas and the mob, in Honeymoon in Vegas (1992);
gay stereotypes, in In & Out (1997); and the makeover
mentality in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001).

The crazy characters of screwball comedies contrast
sharply with their realistic romantic counterparts. For

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screwball Comedy

example, James Stewart's clerk in The Shop Around the
Corner (1940) and Tom Hanks's businessman in the
loose remake, You've Got Mail (1998), are earnest, while
Irene Dunne's title character is decidedly wild in
Theodora Goes Wild (1936). Other memorable screwball
characters include Katharine Hepburn's socialite in
Bringing Up Baby, Barbra Streisand's kook in What's
Up, Doc?, Cary Grant on youth serum in Monkey
Business, the skydiving Elvises in Honeymoon in Vegas,
and Hugh Grant's flatmate (Rhys Ifans) in Notting Hill
(1999).

When naturally zany plays thin, screwball comedy
often reinvents itself by introducing a catalyst for
"crazy." Topper (1937) ushered in a fantasy cause for
eccentricity, as Cary Grant and Constance Bennett play
"ectoplasmic screwballs" (ghosts) come to loosen up
Roland Young's staid title character. This was followed
by two sequels and numerous future fantasy variations,
from I Married a Witch (1942) to All of Me (1984). More
recently, the genre has used celebrity as a trigger for
screwball behavior, such as in Runaway Bride, Notting
Hill, and America's Sweethearts (2001).

While romantic comedy follows a more traditional
dating ritual, with the male taking the lead (usually after
some maturing), as with Billy Crystal in When Harry Met
Sally. . . (1989) and John Cusack in High Fidelity, 2000),
screwball comedy is female driven, with an eccentric
heroine saving an antiheroic leading man from a rigid
(read "dead") lifestyle. Classic examples include
Hepburn rescuing Grant from a double dose of dead (a
bloodless career and an equally sterile fiancee) in Bringing
Up Baby, Liza Minnelli freeing Dudley Moore from the
same dual dilemma in Arthur, and Lily Tomlin helping
Steve Martin evade yet another domineering fiancee and
dead-end job (lawyer) in All of Me. This free-spirited
emancipator is usually a force to be reckoned with, be
it Goldie Hawn's pathological liar in Housesitter (1992,
first cousin to Lombard's master fibber in True
Confession, 1937), or more recently, Queen Latifah,
who awakens Steve Martin's "wild and crazy" past in
Bringing Down the House (2003). The inevitability of the
screwball heroine's victory is nicely summarized by
Streisand at the close of What's Up, Doc?: "You can't
fight a tidal wave." Still, the genre also has room for the
antiheroic screwball heroine who wins despite herself,
such as Renee Zellweger's title character in Bridget
Jones's Diary. Eventually, she both loosens up the classi-
cally rigid male (Colin Firth) and frees him from a
domineering, deadening fiancee.

Pace also plays a major role in screwball comedy.
While the romantic story slows to narrative apoplexy at
the close as the audience agonizes over whether the

couple will ultimately get together, as in Tom Hanks's
drawn-out orchestration of love at the end of You 've Got
Mail, or Billy Crystal's finally reconnecting with Meg
Ryan at the conclusion of When Harry Met Sally . . . ,
screwball comedy's normally quick pacing escalates even
more near the finale, as the title of Theodora Goes Wild
suggests. This pell-mell speed is often coupled with
genre-defining action, such as Hepburn knocking down
Grant's bronotosaurus skeleton (symbolically the last
vestiges of his academic rigidity) in Bringing Up Baby,
and Martin and Tomlin concluding All of Me with an
out-of-control jazz dance number, designating the death
of his law career to become a musician.

As this overview suggests, the screwball formula has
not changed markedly since the 1930s. Today's take on
the genre might actually have gay characters, as in In &
Out and My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), whereas a
pioneering screwball comedy only teases about it — as
when a frilly nightgowned Cary Grant jumps in the air
and yells, "I just went gay all of a sudden!" in Bringing Up
Baby. New catalysts for craziness, such as celebrity, have
evolved, as in the comic chaos Hugh Grant creates by
bringing a movie star Qulia Roberts) to his grown sister's
birthday party in Notting Hill. But these developments are
merely concessions to evolving tastes, not major change. A
greater issue is that the screwball heroine has lost some of
her allure. For instance, both My Best Friend's Wedding
and Forces of Nature (1999) start off as traditional exam-
ples of the genre. In the 1930s the leading ladies of these
pictures (Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock, respectively)
would have broken up the weddings and saved the men
from lives of boring rigidity, but in these two films the
guys opt for the less flashy and eccentric fiancees. In a
genre that normally paints the fiancee as a life-sucking
drone, these pictures portray her as safe and comfortable.
Ultimately, both movies break with the screwball mold
and essentially embrace romantic comedy. In today's truly
life-on-the-edge existence, with new dangers from terrorist
acts to AIDS, unpredictability is less appealing.

Finally, the term screwball merits some closing clar-
ification. Too often people wrongly pigeonhole as screw-
ball any comedy with zany components, from films with
personality comedians such as the Marx Brothers to the
dark comedy of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Along
related lines, just because a manic clown has a girlfriend
does not make a picture a screwball comedy — all movie
funny men have romantic interests. For instance, calling
the dark comedy collaboration between Paul Thomas
Anderson and Adam Sandler Punch Drunk Love (2002)
a screwball comedy would be like labeling Casablanca
(1942) a musical because Dooley Wilson sings "As
Time Goes By." Screwball comedy simply uses a strong
eccentric heroine to parody the traditional romance.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Screwball Comedy

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). ™ AND COPYRIGHT © 20TH CENTURY FOX
FILM CORP./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

FURTHER READING

Byrge, Duane, and Robert Milton Miller. The Screwball Comedy
Films: A History and Filmography, 1934-1942. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1991.

Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of
Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the
Difference. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

. Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance.

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.

. Screwball Comedy: Defining a Film Genre. Muncie, IN:

Ball State University, 1983.
Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to

Sturges. New York: DaCapo Press, 1998.

Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy
and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992.

Karnick, Kristine Brunovska, and Henry Jenkins, eds. Classical
Hollywood Comedy. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic
Comedy of the 1930s. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2nd ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Neale, Steve, and Frank Krutnik. Popular Film and Television
Comedy. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Sikov, Ed. Screwball: Hollywood's Madcap Romance. New York:
Crown, 1989.

Wes D. Gehring

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SEMIOTICS

The terms "semiology" and "semiotics" are frequently
used interchangeably by academics and film theorists.
Broadly speaking, both terms refer to the study of
signs and language systems, though the term semiol-
ogy owes its provenance to the work of Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913) and semiotics to the American
philosopher Charles Peirce (1839—1914). This is a
deceptively simple definition of semiology, which in
fact encompasses a wide range of academic debates
and positions. Semiology is a theoretical model for
the study of language, and its methods have been used
for the analysis of a range of cultural texts, including
film. This method has been championed by
Structuralist academics, and its aim is to uncover what
and why it is that the signs and symbols used in a
cultural system mean what they do. Semiology, then,
is concerned with language in its broadest sense and
has given birth to some of the most notoriously diffi-
cult and abstract of theories. As a method, it focuses
uncovering meaning in signs.

THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOLOGY

As a field of academic enquiry, semiology has its origin in
linguistics as developed by the Swiss academic Ferdinand
de Saussure. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Saussure gave an influential series of lectures on
linguistics in which he proposed semiology as a model for
the investigation of language and language systems.
Saussure's work was unusual in several respects, not least
because, counter to the dominant approach advocated by
linguists at the time, he was not concerned with uncov-
ering the etymology of language but with the ways in
which language was used in the here and now, an

approach that is now usually referred to as "'synchronic'
rather than 'diachronic.'" Saussure did not publish his
work, but following his death in 1912, his students
collected his lecture notes and published them as Course
in General Linguistics.

Saussure's major concern was to develop a science of
signs. A sign can be understood as anything that carries
meaning, although Saussure himself was interested exclu-
sively in linguistic signs — that is, words. He argued that a
sign consists of two indivisible components: the signifier
(the way the sign is communicated) and the signified
(the mental concept the sign communicates). We
know that something is a sign because its two parts are
indivisible — that is, we see something and we can make
sense of it by giving a name to it. Saussure called this
process of reading and making sense of a sign
"signification."

By way of an example, the three letters C- A- T, in
this specific order, mean something in our language
system and culture. They stand in for a cat. So in this
order, these three letters are a sign. The signifier here is
the three letters in THIS specific order, and the signified
is OUR mental concept of a cat. Crucially, Saussure
notes, the relationship between the signifier and the
signified is an arbitrary one. For example, the word
"cat" does not look like a cat, nor does it have any
essential "catness" about it. Through convention, people
have agreed that those three letters stand for the concept
of cat in our language and culture. The evidence of this is
that in Switzerland and France, for example, the four
letters C- H- A- T are a sign meaning the same thing in
French.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Semiotics

In the United States during this same period, the
pragmatist and philosopher Charles Peirce was investigat-
ing signs and sign systems, and he developed a theoretical
model that he called semiotics. Peirce's semiotics was not
confined to linguistic theory in the same way as
Saussure's; it was more fully integrated into his philo-
sophical interests, and it is this broader application of a
theory of meaning systems that distinguishes his work.

Peirce argued that signs can be categorized as belong-
ing to three distinct categories; iconic, indexical, and
symbolic. An iconic sign looks like the thing it represents.
For Peirce, this was the most effective of all forms of sign
system. An indexical sign possesses some kind of physical
link between the sign and the thing it represents, provid-
ing evidence that the thing represented was there. Smoke,
for example, is an indexical sign of fire. A symbolic sign is
arbitrarily linked to what it represents; it neither looks
like the thing represented nor possesses a physical link to
the thing represented. It is a sign that stands in the place
of the thing represented. The written word is the best
example of a symbolic sign.

Signs in Peirce's model can belong to more than one
category simultaneously. This is important in film, where
cinematic images are both iconic — that is, they look like
the thing represented — and indexical — that is, they are
evidence that someone/ thing was present to be photo-
graphed. Animated and computer-generated images can
be iconic but not indexical. Similarly, sound can be
iconic (a voice can sound like the filmed person's voice),
indexical (noises in another room can suggest that some-
one is there), or symbolic (a musical theme can suggest a
character in a film).

SEMIOLOGY AND FRENCH CULTURAL THEORY

The theoretical model formulated by Saussure was to
become especially influential amongst French cultural
theorists and has inspired some of the most widely devel-
oped ideas shaping cultural products, including film.
French cultural theory, especially since the late 1960s,
has shaped and influenced much of the progressive
research into popular culture. Perhaps the key French
theorist for cultural commentators is Roland Barthes
(1915-1980), who adopted Saussure's linguistic model
in order to analyse popular culture from the 1950s
onward, most notably in his collection of essays
Mythologies (1957). Barthes was especially interested in
what Saussure had described as the process of significa-
tion (how we make sense of signs.) He argued that
signification operates at two levels: "denotation" and
"connotation." Denotation describes the literal meaning
of a sign. Connotation describes the process we use to
interpret what we see. At the level of connotation, we
judge and interpret what we have already recognized at a

simpler level; we read deeper levels of meaning into
things at a connotative level. For example, in the film
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) the color red
is used repeatedly as a motif. The titles of the film are in a
bold red, James Dean wears a red jacket, Natalie Wood is
first seen in a red coat and red is used as a color that links
the protagonists of the film to the idea of rebellion. So, at
a denotative level, we might recognize the bold red of the
film's titles or James Dean's jacket as simply titles written
in red and a red jacket; but at a connotative level we are
able to draw on our culture's understanding of the sym-
bolic importance of red, representing danger, anger, love,
and passion.

For Barthes, analysis of popular culture using
Saussure's methods uncovered the hidden or obscured
meanings that lie beneath the everyday, commonsense
notions of popular culture. Using semiology, Barthes
conducted detailed textual analysis to "deconstruct" cul-
tural products. His aim in this project was to reveal the
workings of ideology through what he termed "myth."
Barthes's concept of myth parallels the Marxist concept
of "false consciousness." It is a form of naturalized lan-
guage or discourse that hides itself in the notion of the
commonsense. Doing so helps to maintain the status quo
or consensus within a culture about socially acceptable
norms of behavior and values (dominant ideology).
Barthes analyzed a range of cultural products, including
magazine articles, photographs, and films in order to
uncover myths concerning class, ethnicity, and cultural
imperialism.

While Barthes used semiology to analyze film, he
was driven chiefly by the goal of uncovering the hidden
ideological workings of popular culture. Even so, his
approach demonstrated the usefulness of semiology as a
method for systematically analyzing cinematic texts.
Adopting Barthes's method, critics could undertake
detailed microanalysis of films, frame by frame, in order
to discuss the formal construction of cinematic images
and the ways in which they are used to construct mean-
ing. After Barthes's work became readily available in
English, notably with the publication of a translation of
Mythologies in 1972, his ideas became extremely popular
among a new generation of film theorists, along with
those of the French Marxist Louis Althusser. The method
of analysis advocated by Barthes has been extremely
useful for theorists, including Marxists, feminists, gays,
and lesbians, as well as those concerned with questions of
race and ethnicity.

SEMIOLOGY AND FILM THEORY

While Barthes's methods still play an important role in
the development of film theory, it was Christian Metz,
one of the giants of French film theory, who became best

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Semiotics

known for the use of semiology as a method to analyze
cinema. In Film Language (1968), Metz argued that
cinema is structured like a language. Adopting
Saussure's models, Metz made the distinction between
"langue," a language system, and "language," a less
clearly defined system of recognizable conventions.
Metz contends that film cannot be regarded as compris-
ing a "langue," in the sense of having a strict grammar
and syntax equivalent to that of the written or spoken
word. Unlike the written word, film's basic unit, which
Metz argues is the shot, is neither symbolic nor arbitrary
but iconic; therefore, it is laden with specific meaning.
Metz suggests that film is a language in which each shot
used in a sequence works like a unit in a linguistic state-
ment. In his theoretical model, known as the "grande
syntagmatique," Metz argues that individual cinematic
texts construct their own meaning systems rather than
share a unified grammar.

These ideas were developed upon and expanded by
a wide range of theorists including Raymond Bellour
in The Unattainable Text (1975), who largely supported
Metz's views. Metz's ideas were nonetheless controversial
and became the catalyst for heated debate amongst the-
orists during the 1970s and the 1980s, especially among
Left Wing cultural theorists in Britain and the United
States. The Italian Umberto Eco argued in "Articulations
of the Cinematic Code," that the photographic image is
arbitrarily constructed, just as the linguistic code is arbi-
trary. Stephen Heath challenged Metz's arguments, sug-
gesting in Questions of Cinema (1981) that all cinema is
concerned with representation and that representation
itself is a form of language equivalent to Saussure's lin-
guistic model of "langue." In a similar vein, Sam Rohdie
took issue with some of Metz's key statements while
calling for a continued investment in the systematic
textual analysis that semiology makes possible (1975).

By the mid 1980s, the version of semiology that
Metz had developed had increasingly lost favor and had
become largely replaced in film studies debates by an
interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This shift was per-
haps due to a range of factors, including the waning
interest in the radical leftist politics espoused by most
structuralist thinkers and the emerging interest, especially

amongst feminist academics within film studies, in psy-
choanalysis as a theoretical paradigm. Indeed, Metz him-
self had moved away from his investment in semiology to
emphasize psychoanalysis during the mid-1970s, thus
forecasting the direction that film studies would take as
an academic discipline.

SEE ALSO Film Studies, Ideology, Marxism, Structuralism
and Post Structuralism

FURTHER READING

Bardies, Roland. Mythologies, edited and translated by Annette
Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Bellour, Raymond. The Analysis of Film, edited by Constance
Penley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and

Criticism, 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Eco, Umberto. "Articulations of the Cinematic Code." In Movies
and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, 590-607. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976.

. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1976.

Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1981.

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema.

Translated by Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974.

Peirce, Charles S. Selected Writings. New York: Dover, 1966.

Rohdie, Sam. "Metz and Film Semiotics: Opening the Field."
Jump Cut no. 7 (1975): 22-24.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated
by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.

Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Maiden, MA:
Blackwell, 2000.

Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis.
New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-
Structuralism and Beyond. New York and London: Routledge,
1992.

Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 2nd ed.

London: British Film Institute, 1997. First edition published
in 1969.

John Mercer

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SEQUELS, SERIES, AND REMAKES

Sequels, series, serials, and remakes are evidence of the
commercial imperatives governing most forms of cinema.
Producers, directors, and writers have often been under
pressure to recycle popular formats, formulas, and themes
as a way to minimize risk and ensure profitability.
Sequels, series, and remakes also reflect the tendency of
most forms of entertainment and art to engage in repe-
tition or variations on a theme. Artistic patterns can be
found in all genres: trilogies, suites, triptychs, canons,
rhyme schemes, and motifs, to name a few, all point to
the repetitious core at the heart of most aesthetic phe-
nomena. Yet even as sequels, series, and remakes overlap,
they also establish their own individual characteristics.
The Superman character, for instance, has gone through
numerous incarnations, including the 1978 film
Superman (1978), a remake of two Columbia serials
(based on comic strip characters created by Jerry Siegel
and Joe Schuster) that gave rise to a sequel, Superman II
(1980), and to two more films in a series of four.

SERIES

Series are generally defined as groups of films with self-
contained stories that share the same principal character
or characters and often the same situations and settings.
Series may be conceived as such from the outset, as was
the case with The Hazards of Helen (119 episodes from
1914 to 1917), or, as in the case of the James Bond (over
20 films from 1962 to the present) and Halloween
(8 films between 1978 and 2002) films, they may
emerge, evolve, or become institutionalized over the course
of many years. Although films in each type of series can be
said to constitute episodes, "episode" as a term is probably

associated more with serials and preconceived series than it
is with open-ended or evolving ones.

Building on precedents established in the mass-cir-
culation press and in popular fiction in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, preconceived film series
first emerged in the United States with the Edison
Company's Happy Hooligan films in 1900 and 1901. In
comic or in melodramatic mode, they became firmly
established as a trend in the United States and France
later in the decade, with the production of Biograph's
Mr. and Mrs. Jones films (1907-1908), Kalem's Girl Spy
films (1909), and Yankee's Girl Detective films (1910) on
the one hand, and Pathe's Boireau (1906-1909) and Nick
Carter films (1908-1909), and Gaumont's Romeo
(1907-1908) and Bebe films (1910-1912) on the other.
While the move toward multireel films in the early 1 9 1 0s
resulted in the emergence of melodramatic serials such as
The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913-1914) and of serial-
series hybrids such as What Happened to Mary? (1912)
and Fantomas (1913—1914), comedy series in one-reel
and two-reel form continued to be made. These films
were built around comic personalities, such as Roscoe
Arbuckle (1887-1933) in the Fatty series (1913-1917)
and Max Linder (1883-1925) in the Max series (1910-
1917), and animated characters such as Coco the Clown
and Felix the Cat.

Serials and features became the norm as far as melo-
dramatic adventure was concerned, but comic shorts
featuring the likes of Laurel and Hardy, the Three
Stooges, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck
continued to be made in series form in the United States
for over forty years, shown alongside feature films and
newsreels as an integral part of most cinema programs.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sequels, Series, and Remakes

Musidora in Louis Feuillade's serial Les Vampires (1915) • EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

During the 1930s and 1940s in particular, B movies, too,
became part of these programs. Whether made by small-
scale independents like Monogram or Republic, minor
studios like Columbia or Universal, or major studios like
MGM and Twentieth Century Fox, the majority of B
movies were produced in series. These included westerns
such as the Hopalong Cassidy films (1935-1944 and
1947-1949), detective and mystery series such as Boston
Blackie (1941-1949), The Falcon (1941-1949), The
Saint (1938-1954), and Mr. Moto (1937-1939), medical
dramas such as Dr. Kildare (1937-1947), and comedies
such as Andy Hardy (1937-1958), Henry Aldrich (1939-
1944), and Maisie (1939-1947). Series of A films, by
contrast, were rare. Examples include Paramount's Road
pictures (such as Road to Morocco) with Bob Hope and
Bing Crosby (1940-1952) and RKO's Topper films
(1937-1941), neither of which were envisaged as a series
initially.

In the United States, B series disappeared, along
with B movies themselves, in the 1950s, when series
programming and series production became a feature of

broadcast TV. During the 1960s and 1970s, series
tended to evolve on the basis of follow-ups, sequels,
and prequels, as in the case of the Planet of the Apes and
Herbie films, as well as the Pink Panther and Dirty Harry
films. At the same time, a number of western and com-
edy series produced in Europe and a number of martial
arts films produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong were
highly successful. Since then, series in the United States
have continued to evolve in much the same way, often
around blockbuster films such as Superman and Batman
(1989), but sometimes, too, around low- or medium-
budget horror films {Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm
Street) and comedies {Police Academy).

SERIALS

Unlike series, serials are marked by continuous story
lines. They emerged in the United States and France in
the early 1910s, nearly always in melodramatic adventure
mode. Prompted by the success of series films, and in the
United States by the practice of showing one or two reels
of multireel films on separate days, serial films drew as

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sequels, Series, and Remakes

LOUIS FEUILLADE

b. Lunel, France, 19 February 1873, d. 26 February 1925

Between 1907 and 1925 Louis Feuillade directed over
eight hundred films in almost every contemporary genre in
France, but he is now best remembered as the producer,
director, and writer of serials. His career in the cinema
began when he was hired as a screenwriter by Gaumont in
1905, becoming Head of Production two years later. In
1910 he began making films in series. Fantomas, his first
serial, went into production in 1913.

Based on a series of novels by Marcel Allain and
Pierre Silvestre, Fantomas (1913-1914) details the exploits
of an arch-criminal and master of disguise and the efforts
of a detective and a journalist to catch him. Set and filmed
in contemporary Paris, it involves multiple acts of villainy
and numerous sequences of pursuit, entrapment, and
escape. Building on these elements, Feuillade's next serial,
Les Vampires (1915-1916), centers on a gang of arch-
criminals. Putting even more emphasis on disguise and
multiple identity, Feuillade stages the gang's exploits,
entrances, and escapes in such a way as to suggest almost
uncanny or magical powers. The film's most striking
character, Irma Vep (Musidora), is a true femme fatale, a
figure of fear and fascination alike.

Although championed by the members of the French
avant-garde, both Les Vampires and Fantomas were vilified
by those who wished to elevate the cultural status of film
in France. As a result, Feuillade gave his next serial, Judex
(1917), an uplifting moral tone. Musidora was again cast
as the villain. But the eponymous detective is the film's
central character, his signature black cape the equivalent of

the costumes worn by the criminals in Feuillade's earlier
serials. Other serials followed, but they have rarely been
studied in detail. However, historians of film style have
shown renewed interest in Feuillade.

For many years Feuillade was considered a director
whose use of deep staging and single-shot tableaux
rendered him a conservative, someone who resisted the
tendency toward analytical editing evident in some of his
contemporaries. Later film historians, however, have seen
his work as a variant on a distinct European style, its
subtleties lying in the choreography of action and
spectatorial attention across the duration of shots and
scenes. From this perspective, Feuillade's style, one built
on continual transformations in the flow of appearance,
complements his fascination with protean identity and
with the potentially unending structure of serial forms.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Fantomas (1913-1914), Les Vampires (1915-1916), Judex
(1917)

FURTHER READING

Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915—1929.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Bordwell, David. "La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade; or, What

Was Mise-en-Scene?" The Velvet Light Trap, no. 37

(Spring 1996): 10-29.
Callahan, Vicki. Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and

the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade. Detroit, MI: Wayne

State University Press, 2005.

Steve Neale

well on traditions of serialized storytelling established in
the early nineteenth century and perpetuated in the early
twentieth by mass circulation newspapers, journals, and
magazines. The links between them became clear when
episodes of What Happened to Mary?, often cited as the
first US film serial, were published in prose form in
McClure's Ladies World in 1912, and when Fantomas,
an adaptation of a series of crime novels, was released
in France in 1913 and 1914. Most of the episodes of
What Happened to Mary? and Fantomas were in fact self-
contained. The first true US serial, a form in which each

episode ended in a cliffhanger, was The Adventures of
Kathlyn. It, too, was serialized in prose form, as were
Dollie of the Dailies (1914), The Million Dollar Mystery
(1914), and others.

The centering of serials on heroines was a distinct
US phenomenon, launching Kathlyn Williams, Helen
Holmes, Grace Cunard, Ruth Roland, Pearl White, and
other "serial queens" to stardom. However, although
serials were produced in ever-greater numbers by the
end of the 1910s, the principal attraction in cinemas
was the feature film. Hence serials were increasingly

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sequels, Series, and Remakes

Louis Feuilhtde. THE KOBAL COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

produced as low-budget specialties by second-string stu-
dios like Universal, Vitagraph, Pathe, and Arrow, and
focused more and more on male rather than female
protagonists. With the establishment of the studio sys-
tem, the coming of sound, the advent of the B film, and
then the economic difficulties of the Great Depression,
serials remained the province of "Poverty Row" special-
ists like Republic and Mascot (the term "Poverty Row"
refers to the section of Hollywood around Sunset
Boulevard and Gower Street in which the offices of a
number of specialists in low-budget productions were
located), and minor majors like Universal and
Columbia. Designed principally for children attending
matinees on Saturday mornings, serials in the 1930s and
1940s often borrowed characters and story lines from
comic strips and comic books (the Green Hornet, Dick
Tracy, and Captain Marvel) and sometimes mixed genres
{The Phantom Empire, 1935) in order to augment their
exotic appeal. Westerns, mysteries, jungle stories, science-
fiction stories, aviation stories, and swashbucklers were
otherwise the principal types. Serials like Flash Gordon
(1936) were so popular that two sequels, Flash Gordon's
Trip to Mars (1938) and Flash Gordon Conquers the
Universe (1940), were produced in serial form and edited
feature-length versions made of all three.

Serial production continued apace during World
War II, often featuring Axis powers and agents as villains,
but began to slow down during the period of industry
recession and audience decline in the late 1940s. By the

early 1950s Columbia and Republic were the only stu-
dios making serials, and as serials old and new became a
television staple, production for the cinema in the United
States ceased altogether after the release of Perils of the
Wilderness and Blazing the Overland Trail in 1956.

SEQUELS

Sequels are usually defined as films that contain charac-
ters and continue story lines established in previous films.
Examples include Edison, the Man (1940), a sequel to
Young Tom Edison (1940), and Father's Little Dividend
(1951), a sequel to Father of the Bride (1950). Prequels
set characters and story lines in periods of time prior to
those of previous films, as in Butch and Sundance: The
Early Days (1979), a prequel to Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid (1969), and Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom (1984), a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1979). The Godfather Part 11 (197 '4) , which moves back-
ward as well as forward in time, is an unusual mixture of
both.

Sequels date back to the 1910s, when Maurice Stiller
in Sweden made Thomas Graal's Best Child (1918) as a
sequel to Thomas Graal's Best Film (1917). Unlike
remakes, series, and serials, however, sequels did not
become institutionalized until much later. In the
United States, Paramount produced Son of the Sheik
(1926) as a sequel to The Sheik (1921), and Douglas
Fairbanks produced Don Q, Son of Zorro (1928) as a
sequel to The Mark of Zorro (1920). In Germany, Fritz
Lang made The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) as a
sequel to Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922). And in the
1930s in the United States, Universal made The Bride
of Frankenstein (1935) as a sequel to Frankenstein (1931),
thus helping to generate what eventually became one of a
number of Gothic horror series.

After the occasional sequels made in the United
States in the 1940s and 1950s, it was in the 1970s and
1980s that "sequelitis," as the film critic J. Hoberman
called it, appeared to take hold. The Godfather (1972)
was followed by The Godfather Part 11; American Graffiti
(1973) by More American Graffiti (1979); Grease (1978)
by Grease 2 (1982); and Jaws (1975) by Jaws 2 (1978),
Jaws 3-D (1984), and eventually Jaws the Revenge (1987).
The trend toward sequels continued unabated into the
1990s and early 2000s: The Terminator (1984) was fol-
lowed by Terminator 2 (1991), Young Guns (1988) by
Young Guns 2 (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) by
Hannibal (2001), and Spiderman (2002) by Spiderman 2
(2004).

Sequels are thus a hallmark of what has come to be
known as the New Hollywood. However, this does not
mean that Hollywood prior to the 1970s was less
dependent on preestablished formulas or less prone to

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sequels, Series, and Remakes

the recycling of characters, stories, and settings; nor does
it mean that sequels as such are devoid of ideas and
intelligence. On the one hand Back to the Future, Part
II (1989) and Back to the Future, Part III (1990) both
work playful variations on the temporal paradoxes at
stake not just in Back to the Future (1985) (whose very
title is an index of their nature) but in the sequel format
itself. And Alien (1979) and its sequels — Aliens (1986),
Alien 3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1997) — each spin
variations on the topics of motherhood, difference, and
identity, variations whose dimensions have multiplied as
the series itself has progressed. On the other hand, as
Thomas Simonet points out, the recycling of stories,
formulas, characters, and scripts in Hollywood in the
1940s and early 1950s was actually more extensive than
it was in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly if remakes, as
well as serials and series, are taken fully into account.

REMAKES

A remake is generally thought of as a film based on an
earlier film, usually with minor or major variations of
plot, characterization, casting, setting, or form, and
sometimes language and genre as well. Examples include
Scarlet Street (1943), Fritz Lang's Hollywood remake of
Jean Renoir's French film, la Chienne (1931); In the
Good Old Summertime (1949), a musical remake in color
of The Shop Around the Corner (1940); Chori, Chori
(1956), an Indian remake of It Happened One Night
(1934); The Magnificent Seven (1960), a western remake
in color of The Seven Samurai (1957); The Thing (1982),
a widescreen and color remake of The Thing from Another
World (1951); and Black Cat (1991) and Point of No
Return (1993), Hong Kong and Hollywood remakes
respectively of the French film La Femme Nikita (1990).

However, the issue of what constitutes a remake is
complicated by the degree of variation involved, the
extent to which original versions or previous remakes
are acknowledged, and the fact that originals and pre-
vious remakes may themselves be adapted versions of
novels, plays, and other preexisting sources. (There have
been over a hundred film versions of Cinderella, over
eighty film versions of Hamlet, and over sixty film ver-
sions of Carmen.) The production of different versions of
films for different markets (a feature of the early sound
era), and the extent to which films were copied or reshot
prior to the existence of copyright legislation (a feature of
the early silent era), simply add to the complications. As a
result, remakes have been subject to a great deal more
theoretical thinking than have serials, series, and sequels.
Thomas Leitch has proposed a useful typology of
remakes based on the ways in which they relate to orig-
inal films and previous remakes, on the one hand, and to
their common source or "property" on the other.

Leitch notes, first of all, that while producers typi-
cally pay fees for the right to adapt novels, short stories,
or plays, they usually pay no such fees for the right to
remake a film. He notes, too, that remakes generally seek
to please a number of different audiences — those who
have never heard of the original film, have heard of the
film but not seen it, have seen the film but do not
remember it, have seen but either did not like it or only
liked it to a degree, have seen it and liked it, and so on.
Although most remakes seek to be intelligible to those
who have never seen or are not aware of the original, they
also seek to provide additional enjoyment to those in the
know.

When original films and their remakes are adapta-
tions, other issues arise. For Leitch, remakes of adapta-
tions take one of four different stances toward earlier
adaptations and the properties adapted. The first is to
readapt a property in the interests of fidelity, thus by
implication downgrading the status of earlier versions.
This is the stance often taken by remakes of classic
literary texts such as Hamlet or Camille. The second is
to update the property, revising or transforming its ingre-
dients in obvious ways. Updates often signal their status
by adopting a quasi-parodic tone (as in the 1948 and
1973 versions of The Three Musketeers) or, more obvi-
ously, by using titles such as Joe Macbeth (1955), Camille
2000 (1969), or Boccaccio 70 (1972). The third is to pay
homage to a previous adaptation. Here the focus is on an
earlier film rather than on its source. Examples include
Nosferatu the Vampire (1982), a remake of Nosferatu
(1922), itself an uncredited adaptation of Dracula. The
fourth, simply, is to remake an earlier adaptation. The
true remake, as Leitch calls it, evokes a cinematic prede-
cessor in order to update, translate, or improve it — to
highlight its insufficiencies (its dated attitudes and tech-
niques, its foreign language and style, its inability,
because of some or all of these things, to capture the
essence of the property on which it is based) and thus
render it superfluous. Examples cited by Leitch include
the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, the 1981 version of
The Postman Always Rings Twice, and such Hollywood
remakes of foreign films as Cousins (1989), Sommersby
(1993), and The Vanishing (1993).

An additional type of remake is what might be called
the "authorial revision." Here, producer-directors like
Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, and Howard Hawks
revisit, rework, or update the components of earlier films.
Examples include Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man
Who Knew Too Much; Capra's Pocketful of Miracles
(1961), a remake of Lady for a Day (1933); and El
Dorado (1967) and Rio Lobo (1970), Hawks's subsequent
elaborations on the ingredients of Rio Bravo (1959). As
the director Jean Renoir said, filmmakers often spend
their careers remaking the same film. Insofar as this is

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sequels, Series, and Remakes

true, it returns us to the paradoxical status of repetition
and repetitive forms in the cinema. For, although author-
ial repetition is valued as a mark of individual distinctive-
ness, institutional repetition, whether in series, serial,
sequel, or remake form, is nearly always viewed as its
opposite. This paradox lies at the core of nearly all
discussions of forms of repetition in the cinema.

FURTHER READING

Cline, William C. In the Nick of Time: Motion Picture Sound
Serials. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984.

Forrest, Jennifer, and Leonard R. Koos. Dead Ringers: The
Remake in Theory and Practice. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002.

Hoberman, J. "Ten Years That Shook the World." American
Rim 10, no. 8 (June 1985): 34-59.

Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal. Play It Again, Sam:
Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Lahue, Kalton C. Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving
Picture Serial. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1964.

Leitch, Thomas. "Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric
of the Remake." In Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory
and Practice, edited by Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos,
37-62. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Nowlan, Robert A., and Gwendolyn Wright Nowlan. Cinema
Sequels and Remakes, 1903-1987. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
1989.

Simonet, Thomas. "Conglomerates and Content: Remakes,
Sequels and Series in the New Hollywood." In Current
Research in Film: Audiences, Economics and Law, vol. 3, edited
by Bruce A. Austin, 154-162. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987.

Steve Neale

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SEXUALITY

In the broadest sense, sexuality refers to sexual behavior.
While closely tied to biological urges that seem to impel
human beings (and other animals) to mate, there are
many socially constructed concepts that influence an
understanding of sexuality. In many cultures, for example,
heterosexual monogamy is considered the only "proper"
sexuality, and all other types of sexual behavior are
deemed sinful or unnatural. In the wake of the "sexual
revolution" of the 1960s, when more men and women
felt freer to explore and experiment with other types
of sexual relationships, many attempted to hold onto
this traditional concept of "normal" sexuality. As writers
such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have dis-
cussed, though, the concept of sexuality (categorizing
sexual desires into orientations that form identities) has
been a relatively recent social development — with defini-
tions of sexuality being contested and negotiated con-
stantly. Concepts of sexuality have differed from era to
era, and from community to community. What is con-
sidered taboo in one culture may be accepted as part of
the social system in another. Consequently, all sexual-
ities — including heterosexual monogamy — are exposed
as cultural developments rather than natural drives.

Just as sexuality is intricately threaded into people's
daily lives, so has it been with the history of motion
pictures. For generations, heterosexual couples have used
movie theater balconies and (in the post- World War II
era) drive-ins for trysting. A number of major urban
cinemas during the first half of the twentieth century
also became cruising spots for homosexual men.
Filmmakers repeatedly turned (and still do turn) toward
sexuality as a method of drawing in customers. Almost as
consistently, various concerned citizens (individually and

in groups) voiced objections to such images and called for
greater censorship and punishment. The simultaneous
fascination with and outcry over representations of sex-
uality in motion pictures may have been partly fueled by
the ongoing negotiations around definitions of sexuality
across the globe during the past century. Cinema has
been swept into such struggles as it reflects, disseminates,
and sometimes contests dominant attitudes.

REGULATING SEXUALITY IN EARLY CINEMA

Thomas Edison's (1847-1931) first ventures into motion
pictures already included representations of sexuality.
Hoping to woo viewers to his kinetoscope parlors,
Edison's company made short film loops that had sexual
appeal: "cooch" dancers, pillow fights in a girls' dormi-
tory, a close-up of an actor and actress in full embrace.
Watching these loops through the kinetoscope created a
"peep show" experience. While it seems these snippets
were mainly aimed at arousing heterosexual men, hetero-
sexual women and homosexual men may have derived
pleasure at the kinetoscope of Eugen Sandow bulging
and rippling his muscles — and gay historians have
pointed out the possible pleasures of the clip of two
men holding each other and dancing. While not all early
filmmakers focused on sexuality, many did. The French
film Le Bain (1896) followed in the peep show tradition
by letting audiences watch a woman strip nude before
bathing. Many early uses of shot/reverse shot, such as
British "Brighton School" filmmaker G. A. Smith's As
Seen Through a Telescope (1900), have characters looking
surreptitiously at women in dishabille or couples en
flagrante. The prevalence of such displays of sexuality
indicate that they were popular with some customers,

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yet others were aghast. Such alarm extended beyond the
screen, as reformers criticized the opportunities that the
low-lit environments of nickelodeon theaters created,
even asserting that unaccompanied female patrons were
likely to be kidnapped and sold into prostitution.

The clamor against nickelodeons grew so dense that
the New York City police department closed down all of
the city's theaters in December 1908. A number of
obscenity laws and court decisions were also handed
down that reformers and local police could use to shut
down theaters and arrest exhibitors (and sometimes even
audiences). County councils in Great Britain and city
and state censor boards in the United States were given
legal authority to edit salacious content from films or to
ban them altogether. In the United States, the Supreme
Court judged that film was a business and not an art
form in 1915, and thus not protected by the Freedom of
Speech provision of the Constitution. Similar actions
occurred throughout much of the world by the end of
the 1910s, such as the establishment of federal censorship
bureaus in Denmark (1913) and in Egypt (1914), and
the passage of New Zealand's Cinematograph-Film
Censorship Act in 1916.

While such events may make it seem as if filmmakers
were sex radicals needing to be kept under strict surveil-
lance, most in the industry tended to endorse mainstream
concepts of sexual desire. Such an assumption is borne
out in the prevalence of narrative features that focus
solely on patriarchal heterosexuality. The cliched formula
of "boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl" became
endemic in films from Hollywood to Bombay quite early
in film history. Whether explicit sexual attraction or
heavily muted romantic courtship, every film industry
has been dominated by stories of male/female coupling.
Such emphasis often created a sense that heterosexuality
was the only "natural" sexual desire — if not the only
desire at all. As theorist Laura Mulvey would point out
in the 1970s, mainstream narrative motion pictures also
tend to support a patriarchal heterosexuality by present-
ing women as sexual objects for men (in the narrative as
well as in the audience) to ogle.

Yet cinema also could provide access to contested
or "inappropriate" sexualities — demonizing them but
acknowledging their existence in the process. For exam-
ple, a number of US silent pictures, including Ramona
(1910), The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Broken
Blossoms (all directed by D. W. Griffith, 1919), dealt
with interracial desires. Almost exclusively such stories
told of the tragic, and often horrifying, consequences of
these desires. Similarly, early Indian cinema often dram-
atized the harrowing outcomes of people loving across
caste lines. In a similar vein, German cinema during the
Nazi era included lurid anti-Semitic tales of Jews lusting

for Aryan beauties. Motion pictures also emerged during
a period of shifting roles for women in the United States
and in western Europe. When women began entering the
workplace in greater numbers and demanding the right
to vote, these male-dominated cultures were now forced
to acknowledge that women had their own sexual
desires — often evidenced through rampant adoration of
male motion picture stars. As a recognition of female
(hetero) sexuality, the figure of the vamp — a highly ero-
ticized female who lured men to their doom with her
charms — became popular in motion pictures during the
1910s and 1920s. Actresses such as Theda Bara (1885—
1955), Pola Negri (1894-1987) and Greta Garbo
(1905-1990) became international stars by playing
vamps. Often, sweet Victorian wives or virginal ingenues
played counterpoint to the treacherous vamps — and
actresses such as Mary Pickford (1892-1979) and
Lillian Gish (1893-1993) became stars embodying what
was considered a more appropriate female role model.

In addition to interracial (or intercaste) sexuality, and
challenges to previous understandings of female sexuality,
there grew a greater awareness of what the medical pro-
fession had recently termed homosexuality. At the turn of
the century, concepts of homosexuality were strongly
linked to concepts of gender. Consequently, homosexuals
were commonly thought of as a "third sex" — men who
wanted to be women, and vice versa. When homosexual-
ity was depicted on screen at this time, filmmakers
employed stereotypes of feminine men (often called "pan-
sies") or what were termed "mannish women." Because of
this definition, same-sex affection between two conven-
tionally masculine men or two conventionally feminine
women was often not regarded as homosexual. Thus
same-sex characters in silent cinema sometimes embrace
in a manner that would likely be regarded as suspect to
today's Western audiences. When Hollywood films
included homosexuals, they were minor characters, often
held up for ridicule. However, a small circle of European
films tried to address the topic more centrally and sym-
pathetically — including Vingarne {Wings, 1916, Sweden),
Anders als die Anderen {Different from the Others, 1919,
Germany), and Die Biische der Pandora {Pandora's Box,
1929, Germany). German films in particular were able to
discuss homosexuality (and other sexual matters) more
forthrightly after World War I because, for a short while,
censorship laws were abolished. If such films managed to
get imported to more restrictive countries, they were
heavily cut.

SELF-REGULATING SEXUALITY IN HOLLYWOOD

Sex did not disappear from Hollywood cinema in the
wake of the 1915 Supreme Court ruling, as vamps,
pansies, and racial minorities lusting for white partners

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

roamed the screens — even if the narratives framed them
as wicked or ridiculous. As well, various sex scandals
erupted around a number of Hollywood stars in the early
1920s. Hollywood gained an image of wild parties and
scandalous affairs, and studio motion pictures generally
championed the growing sexual liberation of the post-
Victorian "Jazz Age." In response to a renewed outcry for
reform, the industry decided to create an organization for
self-regulation in order to forestall any further attempts at
federal regulation. Former Postmaster General Will Hays
(1887-1937) was hired to head the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in
order to oversee the morality of the industry, including
the attachment of morals clauses to studio contracts and
the creation of a list of "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls" for
films to follow. The British film industry had established
a similar industry-founded organization as early as 1912,
the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). In general,
the MPPDA's abilities were limited and functioned more
as public relations. The director Cecil B. DeMille (1881—
1959) shifted from making suggestive sex comedies like
Old Wives for New (1918) and Don't Change Your
Husband (1919) to Biblical epics like The Ten
Commandments (1923) that still showcased a wide spec-
trum of sexual licentiousness — but then punished the
transgressors. Hollywood films were wildly successful
across the globe, and an increasingly "movie-mad" public
made sex idols out of stars like Rudolf Valentino (1895—
1926) and Clara Bow (1905-1965).

Renewed complaints by watchdog groups led to the
industry commissioning a new set of rules called the
Production Code in 1930, to more specifically outline
what was acceptable and unacceptable to show or say.
Yet, just as with the list of "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls,"
no effective method of enforcement had been established.
As the Hollywood studios grew desperate to draw audi-
ences during the height of the Depression, sex and sex-
uality became even more blatant. A whole cycle of "fallen
women" films [Blonde Venus, 1932; Rain, 1932; Baby
Face, 1933) had almost every major female star playing
characters turning towards prostitution. A veritable
"pansy craze" developed in the early 1930s as well, with
films such as Palmy Days, (1931) and Call Her Savage
(1932) allowing audiences to hear the lilting lisps of
effeminate men. Degrees of nudity and depictions of
pre- and extramarital sexual relationships also increased.

Public opinion in the United States turned, though,
by the mid-1950s. Many sought to blame the economic
downturn as a result of lax morality — and saw
Hollywood as a prime culprit in this slump. Soon, vari-
ous groups (including the Catholic Church, which cre-
ated the Legion of Decency in 1933 to monitor films)
began organizing boycotts and pressing for federal inter-
vention. Worried by this new turn of events, the studios

revamped their attempts at self-regulation. In 1934 the
Seal of Approval was devised as a method to enforce the
provisions of the Production Code. All studios agreed to
submit their films to the Production Code
Administration for the Seal of Approval, and to pay a
hefty fine for distributing any film that did not receive a
Seal. The Production Code specifically forbade
Hollywood films from acknowledging "miscegenation"
(interracial sex) and "sex perversion" (homosexuality).
The portrayal of heterosexuality was extremely circum-
scribed as well. Indications of extra- or premarital heter-
osexuality or of prostitution were not allowed. Even
further, time limits were placed on kisses — and they
could only be done with closed, dry mouths. Double
beds were eliminated on-screen, even for married cou-
ples. The Production Code Administration even decided
that when a reclining couple kissed on a couch in The
Merry Widow (1934) that one foot always had to be
touching the floor, supposedly keeping the couple physi-
cally incapable of "going too far." The Seal of Approval
proved an effective method of self-regulation for almost
the next two decades of Hollywood cinema.

While the Production Code led to a whitewashing of
sexuality in Hollywood, inventive filmmakers at the
major studios sometimes slyly managed to indicate sexual
activity through metaphor: dissolving from a couple
embracing to waves crashing or fireworks exploding (or,
in the notorious final shot of North by Northwest, 1959, a
train going into a tunnel). Dialogue could also allude to
sexual attraction without actually naming the topic, as
when a conversation between the characters played by
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep
(1946) seems to be about horse racing, but can also be
understood as sexual flirtation. While prostitutes were
officially absent from Code-era pictures, one still could
find plenty of "dance-hall hostesses" and "saloon girls."
Various film genres also effectively veiled libidinous
energy. Sadomasochistic tendencies often filtered through
horror films, for example, and romantic dance sequences
in musicals worked as metaphors for sexual coupling.

Hiding sexuality under a veil of connotation was not
reserved solely for heterosexuality. At various points,
intimations of homosexuality were included in
Hollywood films as well, and managed to slip by the
watchful eye of the Production Code Administration. As
queer theorist D. A. Miller has pointed out, though, once
the concept of connotation is introduced, it becomes
possible for many lesbian and gay male audience mem-
bers to read connotative homosexuality into characters or
moments that may not have been intended by the film-
makers (p. 125). Thus, rather than quelling the existence
of "sex perversion," the enforcement of the Production
Code may have led to a wider and more diffuse sense of
homosexuality for some viewers.

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Sexuality

CATHERINE BREILLAT

b. Bressuire, France, 13 July 1948

Based in Paris, Catherine Breillat became famous as a
writer and filmmaker confronting sexuality from a candid
and unsentimental viewpoint; she was even dubbed a
"porno auteuriste" by some critics. Her start in film was a
supporting role in Bertolucci's landmark exploration of
sexual politics, Last Tango in Paris (1972).

Her first film as writer and director, Une vraie jeune
fille (A Real Young Girl, 1976), focuses on the sexual
experiences and desires of a young woman, but eschews
the romanticism often associated with such tales. Instead,
the main character shows no particular reaction to the
plainly incestuous attention of her father. In contrast, a
blue-collar worker's indifference toward her creates an
insatiable passion for him. 36 fillette (Virgin, 1988) and
A ma soeurl (Fat Girl, 2003) are also offbeat narratives of
young women coming of age. In each of these films, the
female protagonists are not viewed as passive victims in a
male-dominated society, but as active agents of desire
grappling with their feelings, as well as the assumptions
and roles that are thrust upon them by society. This is also
true of many of the adult women in Breillat's other
pictures, such as Romance (1999) and Anatomie de I'enfer
(Anatomy of Hell, 2004).

Yet consistently, Breillat's films frustrate attempts to
psychologically investigate the female characters. Instead,
stylistic choices (including a lack of emotional response by
the performers) create a sense of cold objectivity that
works to keep the viewer at a distance from the characters.
Rather than attempting to explain their desires, Breillat
simply presents them — even when the films portray their
various sexual fantasies. As Breillat herself said of one of
her films, "If people go to see Romance with arousal on

their minds they will be disappointed." Depicting the
unpleasant and unlikable sides of the women characters
often prevents female viewers from identifying with them.

It is perhaps this combination of dispassionate
technique and forthright depiction of sex in all its
polymorphous perversity that has led to numerous outcries
against Breillat's films. A Real Young Girl had difficulties
being screened upon its completion. Scenes of actual
heterosexual intercourse and a shot of an erect penis in
Romance almost kept the British Board of Film Censors
(BBFC) from allowing the film into the United Kingdom.
Neither film was distributed in the United States. The
Ontario Film Review Board in Canada also originally
banned Fat Girl, objecting to scenes depicting sexual
activity by minors and frontal nudity. In 2002 Breillat
made the film Sex Is Comedy (Scenes intimes) , a self-
reflexive story about a female director trying to film an
explicit sex scene the way she envisions it while facing
obstacles from all fronts. Often outraging both male
patriarchal notions and feminists, Breillat's films create
their own unique, unblinking attitude toward sexuality.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl, 1976), 36 fillette
(Virgin, 1988), Romance (1999), Sex Is Comedy (Scenes
intimes, 2002), A ma souer! (Fat Girl, 2003), Anatomie de
I'enfer (Anatomy of Hell, 2004)

FURTHER READING

Armour, Nicole. "Far from Romance: The Coming-of-Age
Films of Catherine Breillat." Cinemascope 9 (December
2001): 12-16.

Sean Griffin

SEXUALITY BEYOND THE UNITED STATES
AND WESTERN EUROPE

The development of film industries in areas outside the
United States and western Europe also had to negotiate
representations of sexuality. For example, in many
nations where the Catholic Church held a powerful
presence, such as some Latin American countries, there
was a strong pressure on filmmakers to keep their repre-
sentations of sexual desire within the bounds of religious
doctrine. It is also important to recognize that filmic

depictions of sexuality in these regions differed from
motion pictures in the United States and western
Europe due to different conceptualizations of sexuality.
For example, while sex between men and sex between
women existed across the world, the medical category of
"homosexuality" was largely a western European concept
during the early twentieth century. Also, while first-wave
feminism had swept western Europe and the United
States, creating a new image of women's active sexuality,
such a movement or image had not taken hold in much

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

Catherine Breillat. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

of the rest of the world. Therefore, depictions of vamps,
pansies, or mannish women were much more limited in
motion pictures beyond the West.

It is important to recognize too that many of these
populations had access to Western images. Hollywood
cinema dominated the global market by the 1 920s. Most
of South America, Africa, and the Middle East was still
under the colonial rule of various European countries —
and thus exposed to the culture of their colonizers.
Therefore, the expression of sexuality in many of these
industries negotiated the differences between their cul-
tures and the cultures of their rulers. The film industry in
India, for example, held to the rules of propriety dictated
by British culture, but also dealt with what was consid-
ered inappropriate to its own communities. While British
censors allowed on-screen kissing (as long as it was
chaste), it became standard not to allow couples to do
so in Indian films. When India gained independence
from the United Kingdom and established its Central
Board of Film Censors in 1949, the ban on kissing
became institutionalized, as well as forbidding displays
of "indecorous dancing."

Japanese cinema provides another good example of
negotiating depictions of sexuality. The Japanese film
industry also kept on-screen displays of intimacy to a
minimum — possibly suggesting or discussing attraction
but keeping most forms of physical contact (including
kissing) out of camera range. Yet, while circumspect on
this issue, Japanese films had no compunction in
acknowledging the existence of the geisha system.
Unlike Hollywood films that strove to deny the existence
of female sex workers, many Japanese pictures acknowl-
edged geishas as part of the community structure. In the
immediate aftermath of World War II, the Allied Forces
oversaw the restructuring of Japanese society, which
included its film industry. As part of the effort to west-
ernize Japanese culture, filmmakers were instructed to
include on-screen kissing for the first time. Thus,
Japanese cinema's attitudes and portrayals of sexuality
began to shift in response to the West.

SEXUALITY OUTSIDE MAINSTREAM
FILMMAKING

The establishment of obscenity laws and censorship
boards and the development of self-regulation within
various film industries worked to circumscribe how much
and what types of sexuality could be depicted in pictures
produced for general entertainment. These attempts at
regulation, though, also led to new types of marginalized
filmmaking in various countries that dealt more explicitly
with sex than was considered acceptable. The growth of
an experimental cinema across Europe and the United
States created a space for espousers of modernism and
"bohemian" lifestyles (including feminism, free love, and
homosexuality) to express themselves in films. French
director Germaine Dulac's La souriante Madame Beudet
{The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1922) depicted a woman's
lack of sexual fulfillment in a conventional middle-class
heterosexual marriage. Un chien andalou (An Andalusian
Dog, 1929, France), by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel,
presented a Surrealist portrayal of the anarchic energy
generated by passionate, unruly desires. Various queer
artists also used avant-garde cinema to express them-
selves, such as James Sibley Watson (1894-1982) and
Melville Webber (1871-1947) in Lot in Sodom (1933,
US), Kenneth Anger (b. 1927) in Fireworks (1947, US),
and Jean Genet (1910-1986) in Un chant d'amour {A
Song of Love, 1950, France).

"Stag" films were even more explicit in showing
sexual intercourse. These early versions of film porno-
graphy consciously broke obscenity laws and hence were
often distributed and shown surreptitiously. Working
just barely within the boundaries of obscenity laws
was a mode of production known as exploitation film-
making. Made by filmmakers outside the major studios,

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

exploitation films sold themselves by specifically discus-
sing those topics forbidden by the Code, such as homo-
sexuality {Children of Loneliness, 1934), venereal disease
{Damaged Goods, 1937), interracial sex {Race Suicide,
1937) and unwed pregnancy {Mom and Dad, 1945). In
the 1930s and 1940s, exploitation films raised these
topics, but in order to warn against them in favor of
heterosexual monogamy. They also usually promised
more nudity and sexually explicit scenes than they
actually delivered (thus keeping within the law).

POSTWAR SEXUALITY ON FILM

World War II helped shift attitudes toward and por-
trayals of sexuality in the United States and western
Europe. "Cheesecake" photography of women helped
"remind GIs of what they were fighting for." Members
of the armed forces were given explicit education (includ-
ing films) about sexually transmitted diseases. Roles for
women in the workforce expanded to include what had
been traditionally considered masculine jobs. Wartime
demands for personnel even led military and civilian
leaders to tacitly overlook the existence of homosexuality
in the ranks or in the workforce. With the end of the war,
though, there was a concerted effort to bring society back
to pre-war notions of sexuality. Social pressures were
placed on women to return to the role of homemaker,
for example, and homosexuality was once again deemed a
mental illness and a criminal act. Yet the 1950s saw
increasing challenges to these attempts. While a "baby
boom" erupted in the United States after the war,
divorce rates also grew steadily. In 1953 Playboy maga-
zine began publication. Dr. Alfred Kinsey's studies on
male and female sexuality (1948, 1953) challenged long-
held beliefs regarding the extent of premarital sex for
women and the prevalence of homosexual activity among
men. Fledgling homosexual rights groups began to form
after the war as well in the United States.

Cinema was often caught up in the postwar struggles
over sexuality. Many European filmmakers championed
greater realism in their work after the war (often in
reaction to the heavily propagandistic films during the
war). As such, sexuality was treated more frankly — yet
(often) not in an exploitative manner. The emphasis on
realism often granted cinema greater critical regard,
which various film industries were able to use to defend
against censorship. The BBFC in the United Kingdom,
for example, instituted the X certificate in 1951 as a
method of allowing pictures to deal with more adult
material instead of simply banning them. When a New
York City exhibitor was arrested on obscenity charges for
running the Italian film L'Amore {Ways of Love, 1948),
the case went to the Supreme Court, which reversed its
1915 decision and declared that cinema was an art form

protected by the Freedom of Speech clause in the Bill of
Rights.

Hollywood studios were losing audiences in the
1950s, mostly to television, but also to foreign films that
were often hyped as more sexually explicit ("shocking
realism" became something of a code-phrase for sex in
film marketing). Many US audiences had associated
European film as more adult for some time (the Czech
film Extaze [Ecstasy], 1933, with a scene of Hedy Lamaar
swimming nude, was released as an exploitation film in
the US, for example). Yet the postwar years saw a major
increase in foreign imports — including Et Dieu , . . crea la
femme {And God Created Woman, 1957, France), Les
amants {The Lovers, 1959, France), Belle du Jour (1966,
France) and Jag ar nyfiken (I Am Curious, Yellow, 1968,
Sweden) — that confronted resistance from various local
and state censors for their forthright depictions of sex-
uality. The international attention given to French New
Wave films such as A bout de souffle {Breathless, 1960)
and Tirez sur le pianiste {Shoot the Piano Player, 1960)
was due to a variety of factors, one being the free dis-
cussion of sexual matters (and occasional moments of
topless females). British Angry Young Man films such
as Room at the Top (1959) and This Sporting Life (1963)
also included frank talk about sex, and Italian director
Federico Fellini's examination of contemporary Italian
society, La Dolce Vita {The Sweet Life, 1960), culminated
in an orgy.

A number of US filmmakers desired more open
discussion of social issues after World War II, including
attitudes around sexuality. Pictures about interracial
romance became more prevalent, for example, possibly
reacting to the wave of Japanese war brides that GIs were
bringing back to the States. (While laws against "mis-
cegenation" began to be repealed in certain areas, it was
not until 1967 that the Supreme Court swept away all of
these statutes.) Unlike silent films that tended to picture
such desires as threatening, films such as Pinky (1949),
Broken Arrow (1950), and Sayonara (1957) were usually
sympathetic — yet rarely allowed the interracial relation-
ship to succeed. Other filmmakers began specifically
challenging the authority of the Production Code
Administration. Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue
(1953) talked about premarital sex and even used the
word "virgin." Denied a Seal of Approval, the film got
even more publicity and became a box-office success.
Combined with the new Freedom of Speech protection,
the success of The Moon Is Blue heralded the slow demise
of the Production Code. Mention of unwed pregnancies,
prostitution, abortions, and teenage sex — along with pic-
tures revealing more and more of the human body — began
to proliferate in US cinema during the 1960s. Studios
increasingly bent the rules by including more explicit
sexual situations — from sex comedies starring Doris Day

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

and Rock Hudson {Pillow Talk, 1959; Lover Come Back,
1961) to a screen version of the notorious novel Lolita
(1962), about an older man's obsession with a teenage girl.

Hollywood filmmakers also began broaching the
topic of homosexuality during these years. A number of
early attempts were adaptations from recent hit plays, such
as Tea and Sympathy (1956) or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1958). Yet because the Code specifically forbade mention
of "sex perversion," the films were forced to launder any
overt references to homosexuality. In response to industry
pressures, the Production Code was revised in 1961, and
one of the changes was allowing films to mention homo-
sexuality. Homosexuals were no longer exclusively defined
(or portrayed on screen) as "gender deviant," but most
Hollywood pictures on the topic made after the Code
revision, such as The Children's Hour (1961) and Advise
and Consent (1962) portrayed lesbians and gay men as
pitiful creatures doomed to suffering and suicide. (In
contrast, the British film Victim, 1961, confronted the
treatment of homosexuals in a heteronormative culture.)
Just as the British X certificate classified material as adult
rather than censoring it, the Hollywood Production Code
was finally scrapped in 1967 and was replaced with a
Ratings System to classify what films were appropriate
for what audiences. By the early 1970s, many countries
(particularly in Europe) had moved to a classificatory
system rather than a censorship board.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION ON FILM

The collapse of the Production Code reflected the emer-
gence of a "sexual revolution" in the United States and
western Europe in the 1960s. Women's sexual freedom
increased during the decade with the marketing of "the
pill" to protect against pregnancy. Soon, a second wave
of feminism began championing women's liberation
from patriarchy. Beat culture in the late 1950s and the
counterculture of the 1960s celebrated "free love," with
many choosing simply to live together rather than join in
conventional heterosexual matrimony. By the end of the
1960s, a modern gay rights movement had begun as well.
Many people began favoring foreign films to Hollywood
product — as well as the growing number of US films
made outside the studio system.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in 1953,
exploitation films of burlesque strippers and nudist
camps proliferated. As more and more obscenity laws
were struck down during the 1960s, exploitation films
began including shots of vaginas and flaccid penises. By
the start of the 1970s, full on-screen coitus was being
presented, and the Ratings System's X rating became
synonymous with pornography. The 1960s also saw a
growth of experimental filmmaking called "underground
cinema" that usually contained explicit nudity and simu-

lated sex acts. Andy Warhol's Kiss (1963), for example, is
a series of close-ups of couples kissing, including a het-
erosexual interracial couple and two male couples. Jack
Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) parodied the Biblical
sex orgies of Cecil B. DeMille films by showing — in a
bored, listless, campy fashion — full-frontal nudity of
both men and women. In the wake of the women's
liberation movement, independent feminist filmmakers,
including Barbara Hammer (b. 1930) (Superdyke, 1975),
Michelle Citron (Daughter Rite, 1978) and Lizzie Borden
(b. 1958) (Born in Flames, 1983), experimented with
methods of picturing female sexuality without falling into
patriarchal patterns of objectification.

By the end of the 1960s, exploitation pictures and
underground cinema were exerting a tremendous influence
on mainstream filmmaking throughout the United States
and Europe. In Hollywood, films such as Bob & Carol &
Ted & Alice (1969) and Carnal Knowledge (1971)
attempted to deal with the sexual revolution. Midnight
Cowboy (1969), about a male hustler, won an Academy
Award® for Best Picture. In various parts of the world in
the early 1970s, important films focused on sexual politics
with no holds barred. WR: Mysterije Organizma (1971,
Yugoslavia), Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Paris; Le
dernier tango a Paris; 1972, Italy/France), The Bitter Tears
ofPetra von Kant (Die bitteren Tranen der Petra von Kant,
1972, West Germany), In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no
corrida, 1976, Japan), and Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom
(Said, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1976, Italy) all dealt
with sex in explicit yet complex and intricate ways. Many
of these films, for example, showed how heterosexual pat-
riarchal notions often still held sway, even within the
so-called sexual revolution. Many exposed the power
dynamics that often infuse sexual desire. Others pointed
out the limits of sexual liberation without an accompany-
ing change in the social and economic order. Though
explicit attempts at a serious discussion of sexuality, these
films were viewed by many as little more than smut mask-
ing as art. Salo was banned in many countries; In the Realm
of the Senses and WR were often recut before they could be
shown; the makers of Last Tango in Paris were charged
with obscenity laws while the film was still in production,
and director Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940) briefly lost his
voting rights. It is thus perhaps not surprising that an
ongoing cycle of similar films did not materialize.

CINEMA AFTER THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

By the end of the 1970s, a general cultural backlash
against the sexual revolution began to develop in many
areas, partly fueled by growing fears of sexually trans-
mitted diseases such as herpes and AIDS. The United
States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany, for
example, elected conservative politicians that promised

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

to restore "traditional values" — which generally meant
reestablishing the patriarchal heterosexual family unit.
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher promoted a
"heritage" culture, which translated into a number of
British films taking place in a nostalgic era of Victorian
propriety. In the United States, under the presidency of
Ronald Reagan (served 1981-1989), "slasher" horror
films became popular, visiting violent retribution on
young people who had premarital sex (with particular
grisly focus on punishing sexually aggressive women).

The sexual revolution was also met with outrage
outside the United States and western Europe. As the
global reach of Hollywood cinema expanded with the
growth of home video in the 1980s, many postcolonial
societies complained of a new cultural imperialism. One
of the major complaints was that United States and
European movies were too sexually explicit, supplanting
indigenous concepts of sexuality with Western ideas. (By
the end of the 1980s, the pornography industries had
moved almost solely into video to provide better dis-
tribution.) For example, film censors in Iran after the
abdication of the Shah in 1979 focused major attention

on what were considered Western-influenced displays of
sexuality, particularly regarding women. Attempts by
filmmakers in India to discuss lesbian desire in films
such as Fire (1996) and Girlfriend (2004) met with
censorship troubles and then protests and riots in the
theaters. Many in India, as well as in various Asian and
African nations, consider homosexuality to be a
Western idea that is being imported to their commun-
ities through popular culture (even though evidence of
some form of same-sex desire can be found in almost
every culture's history).

Yet even in the face of such reactions, discussions
and displays of sexuality continued in cinema. While
on-screen heterosexual kisses were still rare in Indian
film, scenes of women dancing "indecorously" in cling-
ing wet saris became a popular feature of Bombay
cinema by the late 1980s. While explicit scenes of
sexual intercourse remained banned in Japanese cinema,
an entire genre of soft-core "pink films" flourished.
Furthermore, Japanese animators found a way around
this ban by having female characters in explicit
sex scenes with aliens instead of humans (an entire

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

Art cinema meets pornography in Catharine Breillat's Anatomie de l'enfer (Anatomy of Hell, 2004), with pom star Rocco
Siffredi. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

subgenre called hentai, often referred to as "tentacle
porn" in the US).

As the 1990s began, various films seemed to indicate a
renewed attempt to present serious discussions of sexuality
on screen, including The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her
Lover (1989, UK), Henry & June (1990, US), and the
films of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Together
these films led to a small censorship crisis in the United
States, which resulted in the creation of the NC-17 rating
to distinguish these films from straightforward pornogra-
phy. German filmmaker Monika Treut explored
marginalized sexualities such as female sadomasochism
(Female Misbehavior, 1992) and transgendered sexuality
(Gendernauts — Eine Resie durch die Geschlechter, 1999).
Tied to the rise of radical AIDS activism in the West, the
New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s also
challenged "traditional values" by openly celebrating sex-
ual diversity, and at times even challenging the stability of
sexual categories. Although centered in the United States,
New Queer Cinema included filmmakers from Canada
Qohn Greyson, Bruce LaBruce), the United Kingdom
(Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien) and India (Pratibha Parmar).

Such efforts to confront sex and sexuality in its mate-
riality continued with the start of the new millennium.

Independent American directors such as Larry Clark (Kids,
1995; Bully, 2001) and Todd Solondz (Happiness, 1998)
have made forthright pictures about childhood and teen-
age sex, and pederasty. A number of nonpornographic
films also began including explicit heterosexual intercourse
or oral sex, including Baise-moi (Kiss Me, 2000, France),
Intimacy (Intimite, 2001, UK/France), The Brown Bunny
(2003, US), and 9 Songs (2004, UK). Many of these films
caused scandals and protests. Baise moi, for example, was
banned in Australia and Canada, and was recut by censors
in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Some analysts
have pointed out that complaints about the film tended to
center around depictions of sexual acts rather than the
excessive violence of the film. While some defended these
films as attempts to portray sex honestly and without
shame, or to investigate the links between sex and violence,
others decried them as simply a new version of exploita-
tion and sexual licentiousness. Thus, over the past century
of film history, the same debates about sexuality and
cinema have continued to rage.

SEE ALSO Censorship; Experimental Film; Exploitation
Films; Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Cinema; Gender;
Pornography; Race and Ethnicity; Spectatorship and
Audiences; Stars

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sexuality

FURTHER READING

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.

Durgnat, Raymond. Eros in the Cinema. London: Calder and
Boyans, 1966.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. I: An Introduction.
Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books,
1980.

Gever, Martha, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar. Queer Looks.
New York: Routledge, 1993.

Hill, John. Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956—1963.
London: British Film Institute, 1986.

Kuhn, Annette. Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925.

London and New York: Routlege, 1988.
Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the

Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code fom

the 1920s to the 1960s. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Miller, D. A. "Anal Rope." In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay

Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 118-141. New York and

London: Routledge, 1991.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989.

Oshima, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings
ofNagisa Oshima, 1956-1978. Translated by Dawn Lawson.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies.
Revised ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1987 (1981).

Schaefer, Eric. "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of
Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1999.

Screen Editorial Board. The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in
Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Tyler, Parker. Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies.
New York: DaCapo Press, 1972.

Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of
the Visible. " Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Sean Griffin

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SHOTS

A shot is often defined as the basic building block of
cinema because filmmakers work by creating a film shot
by shot, and then, during editing, they join these shots in
sequence to compose the overall film. From this stand-
point, a shot corresponds to the length of film that is
exposed during production as it is run through the cam-
era from the time the camera is turned on until it is
turned off. In this way, the shot forms one unit of a larger
scene or sequence that, in turn, is made up of numerous
shots. To create a shot, therefore, requires that the loca-
tion be lit, that the actors be placed within the frame and
their movements choreographed, and that other elements
of set design and costuming be in place for the duration
of the shot.

While this definition of a shot is a fairly standard
one in film studies, it is also a rather inelegant one, and
it has its share of problems. First, it privileges the shot as
it exists during production rather than in a finished film.
Few shots ever appear "raw" in a finished film. They are
almost always trimmed and massaged during editing, and
they are color corrected during the post-production phase
and, also during post-production, they have sound mar-
ried to them. Thus, the notion of a shot being defined as
footage exposed from the time a camera is turned on
until it is turned off fails to accommodate the ways in
which that footage is transformed during the critical
post-production phase. A better term for this conven-
tional definition is "take."

A more elegant definition of shot is to regard it
simply as the interval between editing transitions. In this
sense, a shot comprises the footage punctuated on either
side by a cut, a fade, a dissolve, or other transition. This
approach is more properly biased toward the organiza-

tion of audiovisual material in the finished film, and it
overcomes the ambiguity that composited shots intro-
duce for the standard definition, which does not concep-
tually accommodate them very well. Composited shots
are those created by combining (compositing) individual
elements that have been filmed separately. Special effect
shots, for example, are composited in this way: a live
actor is filmed against a blue screen; a digital matte
painting is created in a computer; a miniature model of
the set is constructed. Each (excepting the digital matte)
is filmed separately, but all are then layered together in
the process of compositing to create the finished shot.
That shot is then edited with others to make up the larger
scene or sequence. This then, is a weakness with the
standard, production-oriented definition of "shot."
Understood according to this definition, composited
shots are ambiguous because they are composed from
other shots that have been combined. Using the alternate
definition of shot — the interval between edit points —
resolves this ambiguity.

CLASSIFICATION OF SHOTS

As a term like "composite shot" indicates, shots are
classified and described or named according to a number
of variables. These include camera position, camera
movement, camera lenses, the actors involved, and edit-
ing. The most commonly used designations are those
supplied by camera position: close-up (CU), medium shot
(MS), and long shot (LS). A close-up typically shows one
object, very commonly the human face. It isolates that
object from its surroundings and, by doing so, concen-
trates the viewer's attention upon it. For instance, the
extraordinary facial closeups that end City Lights (Charlie

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Shots

Chaplin, 1931) are matched in their expressive intensity
by La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc {The Passion of Joan of Arc,
Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), a film composed almost
entirely of facial close-ups. If the face is cinema's supreme
emotive object, the close-up is the essential method to
reveal it.

Just as a close-up implies a particular camera posi-
tion, a medium shot is composed with the camera located
farther back from its subject and, therefore, shows some
of the surroundings that a close-up will omit. An actor
fdmed from the waist up would be a medium shot. A
long shot has the camera located much farther away from
its subject and is typically used to show a great deal of
environmental information. For example, the long shots
in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) stress the
vastness and emptiness of the desert, which is the film's
main setting and also the metaphor for its titular
character.

As these somewhat loose descriptions suggest, there
is no fixed, measurable boundary between a medium shot
and a close-up or between a long shot and a medium shot,
no point where one unambiguously turns into the other.
Rather, they are loosely defined areas on a continuum of
camera-to-subject distance. As such, they accommodate
intermediate distinctions, including the medium-long shot
or extreme close-up. The climactic gunfight in Cera una
volta il West {Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio
Leone, 1969) includes a series of close-ups of antagonists
Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, and then, in one of
Bronson's close-ups, the camera zooms in to his eyes,
which fill the widescreen frame in an extreme close-up.
As this example indicates, the mobility of the shot in
cinema can make it resistant to rigid labeling. A long shot
might become an extreme close-up, as in Notorious (1946)
when director Alfred Hitchcock opens with a high-angle
long shot of guests at a party and then moves the camera
down and in to a very tight close-up of a key that one
character holds in the palm of her hand. A full figure shot
of Fred Astaire dancing might be described as a medium-
long shot, though if he moves off into the background of
the set, or if the camera pulls up and away from him, the
shot might become a long shot. A shot can be dynamic;
as it changes, so might its label.

The camera movement described in the Fred Astaire
example suggests another means of labeling a shot. It
could be called a boom shot or a crane shot, after the
mechanical device on which the camera is attached to
create its movement. Shots, therefore, may be named for
the type of camera movement that occurs within them.
Dolly shots typically include a small, short movement
performed with the camera on a dolly, a small, movable
platform. Tracking shots feature more extensive move-
ment, with the camera pushed along a set of tracks.

Seven types of shots according to camera position.
© THOMSON GALE. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Shots

Steadicam shots feature motion performed with the cam-
era strapped to the camera operator's body.

The lens on the camera may also furnish a means for
defining a shot. Zoom shots simulate camera movement
by using a zoom lens that progressively magnifies the
image, but they do not supply the true motion perspec-
tive that only a moving camera can capture. Telephoto
shots use a long focal length lens that makes distant
objects appear closer than they are. Japanese director
Akira Kurosawa sets his cameras far back from the actors
and films with telephoto lenses to bring everything into
close perspective. By contrast, wide-angle shots make near
objects seem farther away than they are.

Using these lenses introduces an interesting ambigu-
ity into the conventional LS-MS-CU designations as
these tend to imply a one-to-one correspondence with
camera position (for example, the camera is close in a
close-up). A filmmaker could use a telephoto lens to
produce a close-up while the camera is actually in a long
shot position. Many scenes in films where characters walk
along city streets and are shown in conversation in CU or
in MS are shot with the camera far away in a telephoto
setting. The close-up effect produced by the lens takes
precedence over the facts of the camera's true position.
While one would still label these shots as close-ups or
medium shots, it would require a discriminating viewer
to perceive the contradiction between the camera's
implied and actual position.

In addition, the number of actors in a shot some-
times furnishes the means for labeling that shot. A two-
shot features two actors, a three-shot shows three, and so
on. Editing also gives us a taxonomy for describing shots.
A master shot is the one that contains the action and
dialogue of the entire scene filmed in a medium or
medium-long shot setup. Editors then intercut the master
shot with footage from other camera setups showing
partial views of the scene's action. An insert, for example,
is a closer shot of a detail or bit of business that is cut into
the master shot. Master shots perform an orienting func-
tion for the viewer by showing where everything is situ-
ated in the geography of the space of a scene. Similar to a
master shot, in this respect, is an establishing shot, which
provides a long shot view of a set or locale and thereby
serves to orient the viewer and provide for a gradual entry
into the dramatic content of a scene. Many films begin
with establishing shots. Think of all the detective and
crime films that open with long shots of the city. These
long shots function as establishing shots, conveying the
urban locale of the story.

When they are used to open a scene or film, estab-
lishing shots are typically followed by closer views of the
action. These closer views may include inserts and close-
ups. They may also include point of view shots that

simulate the approximate line of sight of a character. A
subjective shot is a point of view shot that exactly corre-
sponds to what a character is seeing. A few films sustain
the point of view shot design throughout their entire
length: Lady in the Lake (1947) and 84C MoPic (1989)
are composed entirely of subjective shots.

A shot, therefore, can be described in numerous ways
depending on the variable (lens, camera movement, edit-
ing) that is relevant for the analysis. These descriptive
terms are never separate from the expressive possibilities
that the different shots afford. As noted, close-ups serve
to focus and concentrate the viewer's attention on sig-
nificant details, and they are excellent vehicles for convey-
ing emotion, as in facial close-ups. Tracking shots convey
the excitement and exhilaration of motion. Classical con-
tinuity editing relying on orderly changes among master
shots, medium shots, and close-ups serves to clarify dia-
logue and convey essential narrative information.

AESTHETICS OF THE SHOT

Many filmmakers treat the shot as an extended unit of
expression and composition. Such filmmakers as Orson
Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Jean Renoir, and William
Wyler favored a practice of working within the bounda-
ries of a single, extended shot (called a long take), rather
than cutting among many camera setups (which is the
normative practice in cinema) in creating a scene. At its
most extreme form, this practice results in sequence shots,
an entire sequence lasting several minutes done as a
single, extended shot. The Hungarian filmmaker,
Miklos Jancso {Red Psalm, 1971), composes his films as
a series of sequence shots; a ninety-minute film by Jancso
may contain as few as ten shots.

This aesthetic practice emphasizes the structural
integrity of a shot with overwhelming expressive force
because the shot takes precedence over editing. In
Welles's case, the sequence shot may be coupled with
deep-focus composition; in Kurosawa's, by a static cam-
era emphasizing the hieratic positioning of the actors; in
Renoir's, by a continuously moving camera that fluidly
reframes the composition. In each case, the design insists
upon the real time that exists within the shot and disen-
gages it from the structured cinematic time of the rest of
the film as created through editing.

Admittedly, by the standards of contemporary com-
mercial cinema, filming in long takes is a very deviant
practice. Films constructed from montage, from very
quick cutting, have become the norm today in commer-
cial cinema. Montage, however, devours the structural
integrity of the shot as a unit of meaning that can stand
alone. In montage, no shot stands alone; instead, the total
gestalt produced by the montage is what counts. The
expressive possibilities which the shot enables — extension

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Shots

Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) is one of the few films that sustains a subjective or first-person perspective
throughout. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

in time, space and depth of field, compositional richness,
the subtleties of facial expression, and the heightened
performances that result when actors play off one another
in real time — are diminished by over-reliance upon
montage. As a discrete unit of meaning that can be
insisted upon for its own richness, the shot is an endan-
gered species in contemporary cinema.

It is endangered for yet another reason. As cinema
evolves from its photomechanical base in celluloid to a
new existence on digital video, shots are no longer strictly
required. Shooting on digital video, a filmmaker need
never cut. He or she can compose an entire feature film
as a single, unbroken shot, as Alexander Sokurov did in
Russian Ark (2002).

Until the digital era, films existed as a series of shots
because filmmakers had no alternative. They had to cut
numerous shots together to make their films because the
camera's magazine held a limited amount of footage
(generally about ten minutes). This mechanical con-

straint compelled them to cut, and as film moved toward
longer forms early in its history, filmmakers had no
choice but to conceive of films as a series of shots created
in artful relation to one another. The beauty of cinema
lies in this orchestration of expressive design across
numerous shots. In this respect, the aesthetics of cinema
were rooted in a mechanical constraint. Occasionally, a
filmmaker might explore the potential of doing away
with shot-by-shot construction. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope
(1948) aimed to create the illusion that most of the film
was constructed as a single shot. In fact, however,
Hitchcock was cutting among numerous shots; he was
merely hiding the cuts. As long as it was based in cellu-
loid, feature film required that filmmakers work shot by
shot.

As Russian Ark demonstrates, digital video has
removed this requirement. On the one hand, the single
shot design of Russian Ark is such a flamboyant concep-
tion as to represent the apotheosis of the shot. How could

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Shots

a shot ever rise to a more monumental form of expression
than here, where Sukorov moves his camera across several
centuries of narrative time and orchestrates the move-
ments of 800 actors? Yet, just as montage devours the shot
by severely limiting the weight of its expressive design, it
turns out that the expansion of its boundaries in Russian
Ark produces a similar effect. By eliminating editing alto-
gether, the extreme shot duration made possible by digital
video dissolves a powerful source of cinematic design.
Removing the alteration of visual expression across shots
by removing the edited series, the unbounded shot of
digital video loses its identity as a shot. Without boundary
there is no essence. The power of the long takes employed
by Kurosawa, Welles, and others lies in the way they open
up a stylistic alternative in the body of a film whose
editing does not rely on extended shots. Virtue lies in
contrast. By removing contrast, the unbounded shot of
Russian Ark, and its potential in digital cinema generally,
poses as severe a threat as montage to the structural
integrity of the shot in cinema.

Despite what the digital future promises, the shot as
the basic unit of cinema is unlikely to perish. The con-
trast among shots suspended in series has been, and will
likely remain, the key aesthetic experience of the
medium.

SEE ALSO Camera; Camera Movement; Editing;
Technology

FURTHER READING

Blandford, Steve, Barry Keith Grant, and Jim Hillier. The Film
Studies Dictionary. London: Arnold, and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.

Dmytryk, Edward. On Film Editing. Woburn, MA: Focal Press,
1984.

Kawin, Bruce. How Movies Work. New York: Macmillan, and
London: Collier Macmillan, 1987.

Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film
Editing. Los Angeles: Sliman-James Press, 1995.

Oldham, Gabriella. First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art
of Editing Film. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Prince, Stephen, and Wayne Hensley. "The Kuleshov Effect:
Recreating the Classic Experiment." Cinema Journal 31,
no. 2 (Winter 1992): 59-75.

Reisz, Karel, and Gavin Millar. The Technique of Film Editing.
Boston: Focal Press, 1983.

Stephen Prince

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SILENT CINEMA

By 1915 cinema seemed poised to enter a new phase of
its development: with bigger-budgeted multireel films,
popular and widely publicized stars, new modes of
production and distribution, picture palaces, and aspi-
rations of artistry all vying to define the medium in
different ways, that sense of potential was more than
met in the fifteen years that followed. What no one
could have predicted was that the end of the 1920s
would mark not only the completion of cinema's third
full decade of existence, but also the end of a particular
form of cinematic expression ushered in with the
advent of features. Whether viewed as an economically
motivated inevitability or a technologically generated
caprice, the introduction of sound effectively put a stop
to the unique qualities of silent cinema. Compelling
arguments can be made that as many fundamentals of
form and practice persisted as perished when sound
displaced silence as the dominant cinematic mode;
nonetheless, sound challenged the primacy of the
image, resulting in a rethinking of how to harness the
expressive capacities of the medium. Affected least by
sound's introduction was the classical, conventional
filmmaking strongly associated with Hollywood.
Conversely, the experiments launched within the con-
texts of other national cinemas, specifically those of
France, Germany, and the USSR, evaporated in sound's
wake, leaving the norms of American cinema virtually
unchallenged for the next fifteen years. Many would
lament the passing of the silent era, some with a fervor
bordering on reverence; eventually, nostalgia for a para-
dise lost was replaced by respect for the considerable
achievements of an aesthetically distinct segment of
cinematic history.

INTERNATIONAL POSTWAR STRUGGLES
AND THE ASCENDANCY OF HOLLYWOOD

It was a specific technological development that ended
the mature silent period, but it was an international event
of epoch-defining magnitude that helped mark its begin-
ning. By and large, World War I, which began in 1914,
had a disastrous effect on most national cinemas in
Europe, hastening a decline already apparent for some
(England, France) while halting the momentum experi-
enced by others (Denmark, Italy). Only two countries,
Sweden and Germany, emerged from the war with their
national cinemas in a stronger position than when it
began. Both benefited from restrictions placed on them
during the war, primarily in the form of a blockade on
imports imposed in 1916. While Sweden saw its own
domestic industry bolstered by the blockade (and an
ability to export to Germany), Germany's thrived, par-
ticularly because the ban was sustained there until 1920.
Demand for films meant that the number of production
companies in Germany grew exponentially, reaching 130
by 1918. A year earlier Germany's government had taken
steps toward centralization of the industry, with the for-
mation of Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, or Ufa,
which merged production, distribution, and exhibition
via a vertically integrated, state-run model. After the war,
Ufa passed to private ownership but remained the pri-
mary distributor for German films. Ufa's massive studios
also allowed Germany to mount films whose scale and
production values rivaled those from its only true com-
petition within the international market during this
period — Hollywood.

Coincident with a push into wider markets by
the country's manufacturing sector, the American film

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Silent Cinema

industry continued to make inroads internationally in the
years prior to World War I. But the war diminished the
producing capacity of its chief rivals, Italy and France,
opening the market to US domination more readily.
Benefiting from its geographic separation from the war-
time deprivations plaguing Europe, the American film
industry capitalized on its advantages, increasing direct
sales to markets where its presence had been less prom-
inent before the war. The turning point appears to have
been 1916, and the United States retained its domination
of the international market from that point onward. A
key component in that dominance was the industry's
ability to spread its exporting might across regions, so
that by the close of the decade exports to all the major
markets (save Africa) were much more evenly distributed
than ever before. Although Europe was still the major
recipient of American films, South America, Asia, and
Oceania each accounted for roughly 10 percent of US
film export revenue. The United States moved into the
1920s buoyed by the confidence that it was the undis-
puted commercial dynamo, with an average annual pro-
duction rate of over six hundred features a year.

Had the war not intervened, matters might have
developed quite differently, considering how slowly the
American film industry moved into production of fea-
tures as compared to France and Italy, the pioneers in epic
feature filmmaking. And when it did begin to produce
features in earnest by 1914, the industry had to contend
with the widespread changes to distribution and exhibi-
tion such a shift in production strategy entailed. In
retrospect, it is evident that the timing of the American
switch to features was fortuitous, as it occurred at the
onset of the war, when the United States could best
afford these substantial disruptions to its industrial sys-
tem. The chief impediment to America's wholesale adop-
tion of the feature film was the existing distribution
system, which, since the early days of the General Film
Company, had concentrated on renting packages of short
films, typically at a set price, to any theater capable of
paying. Arguably, adherence to this method of distribu-
tion had inhibited attempts to experiment with longer
films, especially when those which had been produced
were released in a staggered fashion as a series of discrete
single reels, incorporated into a standardized package of
other shorts.

Other distribution options did eventually present
themselves, though they proved of limited value for han-
dling the large number of features the industry would
come to release annually. One such approach was road-
showing, borrowed from theatrical models, whereby a
film moved from city to city, with venues rented specif-
ically for the purpose of showing that title. For large-scale
productions that lent themselves to splashy publicity
campaigns, such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), the

most famous example to be distributed in this fashion,
roadshowing made sense; but it was not workable for a
steady stream of features. Another strategy was the state
rights system, wherein the rights to distribute a film
would be allocated for a prescribed region. Those holding
the rights could choose to rent to exhibitors within the
region or split up their rights further. Although the state
rights system also provided films with more individual-
ized advertising campaigns than the package approach
afforded, it remained a piecemeal approach to distribu-
tion, with no national reach. What features required were
the more developed publicity mechanism associated with
roadshowing and state rights, coupled with the compre-
hensive coverage of territories General Film and its ilk
had provided.

The first satisfactory alternative arrived in the form
of Paramount Pictures, which offered exhibitors a full
annual slate of features, replete with advertising. Formed
in 1914 by bringing together eleven local distributors,
Paramount was soon releasing the films of Famous
Players Motion Picture Company, one of the premiere
producers of feature-length films. Paramount's ability to
advance funds to the producers whose features it released
translated into greater security for those producers, who,
in turn, were able to expand their production budgets.
Adolph Zukor (1873-1976), the head of Famous
Players, recognized the centrality of distribution to pro-
duction strategies and soon engineered the merger
of Paramount and his firm in 1916, along with another
important production company releasing through
Paramount, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.
The resulting production-distribution combine, Famous
Players-Lasky, set the standard for what would become a
discernible tendency toward mergers and consolidation
within the American film industry over the remainder of
the silent period. The ultimate goal was vertical integra-
tion, wherein one firm owned and operated all three
sectors of the industry: production, distribution, and
exhibition. Famous Players had started primarily as a
producer, acquired distribution three years later, and
then finally began buying theaters in 1919, ultimately
merging with the large regional theater chain, Balaban
and Katz, in 1925. First National, which became verti-
cally integrated in 1922, grew in the opposite fashion.
Formed in 1917 by a group of exhibitors who resented
Paramount's abuse of block booking (wherein exhibitors
were forced to accept the entirety of a release schedule in
order to secure any of the films on offer), First National
first moved into distribution before establishing its own
production facilities five years later. Nearly all the major
players within the American film industry would be
vertically integrated by the 1920s, and most of these
firms had been operating within the industry since the
mid-teens in one form or another. Tracing the mature

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studio system to the advent of the feature film may be
something of a simplification, but the seeds of that
system were definitely sown in the upheavals produced
by the shift to feature production.

THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA

Tendencies already evident in the previous period grew
more pronounced as firms became larger and films
became longer and more costly. In particular, the pro-
duction process became progressively more standardized,
with division of labor and departmentalization of crafts
refined even further to rationalize the process of making
films within a large-scale studio system. Thomas Ince
(1882-1924) and Mack Sennett (1880-1960), both early
proponents of a centralized production process wherein a
production chief oversaw the work of numerous distinct
units, helped establish the model upon which Hollywood
would build throughout the 1920s. The studio system
aimed to achieve both efficiency and product differentia-
tion; thus, as much as standardization was prized, it
could not be promoted at the expense of a certain degree

of novelty and innovation. The result was a modified
version of Fordism: principles of mass production were
observed wherever possible, tempered by a bounded
creativity.

The standardization of the production process trans-
lated into the representational norms pursued by
Hollywood studios as well. Control over all aspects of
production ensured that a degree of uniformity would
define how stylistic elements functioned within American
films. Now commonly referred to as the classical style, by
the late teens it had become an internalized set of norms
followed by all the studios. At its center was the imple-
mentation of interconnected rules concerning editing,
which ensured a smooth and coherent rendering of time
and space. Not only did continuity editing guarantee the
spectator's ongoing comprehension of the spatial coordi-
nates of the represented action, it systematically broke
down that action to guide the spectator's attention, with
an eye to highlighting the narratively salient actions. For
this reason, editing became much more insistently ana-
lytical from the mid-19 10s onward, with establishing

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shots giving way to a series of closer-scaled shots designed
to render the space narratively intelligible. In particular,
editing worked to reinforce character psychology, so
that shot-reverse shot sequencing and the point of view
shot became cornerstones of the classical approach to
cutting.

Sets of Hollywood films were sufficiently detailed to
produce an effect of realism promoting believability;
studio lighting molded figures and heightened dramatic
moments as required; camera movement was judicious,
typically employed to follow characters or readjust the
framing to maintain stable and well-centered compositions.
Hollywood classicism prized unity and self-effacement over
bravura demonstrations of stylistic prowess, precisely
because the system took priority over any individual prod-
uct or practitioner. Overall, the Hollywood style func-
tioned to draw as little attention to itself as possible, its
primary role being to serve the prerogatives of the story.
Because the tightly woven causal chains at the center of
these narratives seemingly sprang from the motivations of
the central characters, the actors playing them became
fundamental to the success of Hollywood's films. Stars
did more than help connect audience members emotionally
to the potentially repetitive narrative formulas devised by
the studio system: their function as cultural phenomena
reinforced the fantasy associated with Hollywood, outstrip-
ping these performers' mere presence on the screen.

STARS AND MOVIE CULTURE IN THE 1920s

Even before American companies began actively promot-
ing their actors by name around 1910, audiences had
demonstrated their preference for particular performers,
resulting in such favorites as the Biograph Girl (Florence
Lawrence) and the Vitagraph Girl (Florence Turner).
Initially, stars were known only for their onscreen per-
sonae, so that the actor's (first) name became synony-
mous with his or her characterizations. Such was the case
with the two preeminent stars of the 1910s, Mary Pickford
(1892-1979) and Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977). Before
the star system could reach its mature stage, knowledge of
the stars' offscreen lives also needed to become available
to eager fans. Fan magazines, of which Photoplay was the
first to appear in 1912, supplied this information, though
the true source for most such promotional material was
the studios themselves. Not surprisingly, given the cen-
trality of stars to the success of Hollywood features, the
star system developed in tandem with the industry.
Pickford had proven instrumental to Zukor's early suc-
cess with features and functioned as the carrot to go with
the stick of block booking. The undeniable pull the top-
rank stars exerted at the box office placed them at the
center of publicity campaigns and pushed salaries ever
higher, with the average weekly paycheck quadrupling in

the period between 1916 and 1926. The most powerful
stars saw their power extend beyond monetary rewards:
in the most celebrated instance of stars laying claim
to control over their careers, Pickford, Chaplin, and
Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) (in collaboration with
the famous director D. W. Griffith [1875-1948]) formed
United Artists in 1919 as a distribution outlet for
their productions. Each of these stars would command
yearly salaries in excess of $1 million by the 1920s.

It is no coincidence that the star system emerged at
the same time as motion picture production was shifting
its central operations from the East Coast to the West.
The ongoing relocation of film personnel to the Los
Angeles area facilitated the identification of movie-star
lifestyles with the geographical (and symbolic) site of
Hollywood. Hollywood thus became synonymous with
a particular lifestyle; it was not simply where movies were
made, but where those who made movies chose to live.
Moreover, that life assumed a special quality reinforced
by the physical separation of movie stars from the rest of
the United States. As denizens of a distinct colony, stars
were expected to lead lives that justified the coverage they
received in fan magazines and that would stimulate the
longings of admiring, even envious, fans. In this way stars
became synonymous with a type of conspicuous con-
sumption, endemic to the years of unbridled economic
growth in the United States during the 1920s. As their
salaries grew, and their possessions and homes became
more luxurious, movie stars came to epitomize a fantasy
of wealth and choice. They functioned simultaneously as
a realization of the American Dream — the boy or girl
next door rising to fame and fortune — and an impossible
ideal — larger-than-life figures living an existence only a
rarefied few could ever enjoy. Their film roles would
often mirror this duality, with many narratives of the
1910s and 1920s placing stars within two favored scenar-
ios: either the star is wealthy at the outset, but shows
himself/herself to be possessed of values that equate him/
her with the common people; or, the star gains wealth by
the film's conclusion, ideally by meeting the perfect (and
perfectly wealthy) mate, but never sacrificing him/her
principles in the process of attracting a rich suitor.

Both through their performances and the presenta-
tion of their public and private lives, then, stars had to
appear remote and exotic while also seeming familiar and
normalized. Stars lived a kind of dream existence, a
heightened version of everyday life, and it was predicated
on their sustaining a complex balancing act within the
minds of their fans. In the early 1920s a series of scandals
threatened that balance, puncturing the illusion that all
stars lived by the same moral code adhered to by those
who adored them. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1887—
1933) faced rape and murder charges connected to the
death of a starlet whom the rotund comedian had met at

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MARY PICKFORD

b. Gladys Smith, Toronto, Canada, 8 April 1893, d. 29 May 1979

No major star within the silent era can match the career
longevity of Mary Pickford. Starting at Biograph in 1909,
she established herself as a leading performer with her first
films and went on to become the industry's biggest female
star for the next two decades. Compelling onscreen,
Pickford was equally adept at controlling the aspects of
stardom that extend beyond the screen. A consummate
businesswoman, she capitalized on her popularity from
early on, negotiating favorable terms of employment and,
eventually, considerable creative control. She achieved a
degree of power most stars during the period could not
hope to possess.

Pickford began acting as a child in Canadian
theatrical productions before moving on to the New York
stage under the tutelage of the impresario David Belasco in
1907. Switching to films two years later, she made a strong
impression at Biograph, particularly as a comedienne.
Even though the names of film performers were not made
known to the public at that time, fans soon christened
Pickford "Little Mary"; she parlayed that recognition into
a series of increasingly lucrative contracts, moving from
one company to another, and commanding a salary of
several thousand dollars a week in the process. In 1916 she
tightened control over her career by forming the Mary
Pickford Corporation, and soon her earnings rose to
nearly $1 million a year.

Distributors used the Pickford name to entice
exhibitors to rent blocks of films among which would be
her star vehicles. Recognizing how indispensable she was
to a company's bottom line, she insisted on sharing in
whatever profits her films earned. As the industry moved
toward a vertically integrated structure by the close of the
decade, Pickford elected to take over the distribution of
her own titles by forming United Artists with her soon-to-
be husband, Douglas Fairbanks; her director from the

Biograph days, D. W. Griffith; and her rival in box-office
popularity (and record-setting earnings), Charlie Chaplin.

Even as Pickford remained one of the most
financially astute of the early stars (exploiting the benefits
of the celebrity testimonial in advertising campaigns, for
example), she failed to find ways to develop her onscreen
persona. In her early films a particular type emerged —
plucky, impetuous, but good-humored — and in the years
to come fans resisted any substantial changes to the
Pickford screen personality. Her golden ringlets
symbolized the eternally youthful sensibility her roles
demanded, and she became trapped in a cycle of films as a
perpetual child-woman. Most attempts at expanding her
range failed, and even when she cut her hair in defiance of
her established image, she was forced to wear a wig
onscreen to ensure continuity with the Little Mary of years
past. Forever identified as "America's Sweetheart," upon
the introduction of sound she became an increasingly
anachronistic figure and retired from acting for the
lucrative management of United Artists.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Wilful Peggy (1910), The New York Hat (1912), Tess of the
Storm Country (1914), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
(1917), Stella Maris (1918), Daddy-Long-Legs (1919),
Pollyanna (1920), Sparrows (1926)

FURTHER READING

Balio, Tino. United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.
Eyman, Scott. Mary Pickford, America s Sweetheart. New

York: Dutton, 1990.

McDonald, Paul. The Star System: Hollywood's Production of
Popular Identities. London: Wallflower Publishing, 2000.

Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made

Hollywood. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997.

Charlie Keil

a "wild" party; Mary Pickford's image as "America's
Sweetheart" was not easily reconciled to her divorce in
1920; the murder of director William Desmond Taylor
(1872-1922) (famous for having directed numerous
Pickford vehicles) implicated two celebrated actresses,

Mabel Normand (1892-1930) and Mary Miles Minters
(1902-1984); and matinee idol Wallace Reid (1891-
1923) died as a result of morphine addiction. The col-
lective force of these scandals lent credence to the notion
that Hollywood was out of control, and that hedonism

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Mary Pickford. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

and self-indulgence had come to define the movie colony
lifestyle.

Onscreen, matters were no more encouraging. Erich
von Stroheim's (1885-1957) dramas, such as Blind
Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922), revolved
around scenarios of seduction and infidelity overlaid with
psychological realism and a degree of sadism. Cecil B.
DeMille's (1881-1959) comedies of manners from the
same period, including Don't Change Your Husband
(1919), Male and Female (1919), and Why Change Your
Wife? (1920), treated their audiences to the spectacle of
Gloria Swanson (1897-1983) in various states of undress
while promoting the pleasures of wanton consumerism.
Fearing the imposition of state-controlled censorship
(and worse, as public concern over stars' behavior coin-
cided with congressional calls for greater control over the
business operations of the film industry), the studios
acted preemptively. Enlisting the country's postmaster
general, Will Hays (1879—1954), as head of a new trade
organization, the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America, the industry's leaders hoped
Hays would be able to use his political acumen and
sober, Presbyterian image to combat the bad publicity
and forestall government intervention. Hays, who was

well connected to Washington, wasted no time in giving
the appearance of introducing significant changes
designed to "clean up" Hollywood. He saw to it that
the studios introduced morals clauses into their stars'
contracts, pulled Arbuckle's films from distribution,
and, most significantly, introduced the first in a series
of self-regulatory documents designed to curb onscreen
excesses. That Hays's efforts produced few tangible
results remained secondary to the impression he created
of being committed to effective regulatory monitoring of
film content. As the decade wore on, new guidelines were
introduced in the guise of the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls,"
but the imposition of a meaningful form of self-regulation
did not take place until the Production Code
Administration of the 1930s.

AT THE MOVIES

As much as the star scandals of the early 1920s may have
outraged sectors of the American populace, the negative
publicity did little to dampen the general enthusiasm for
motion pictures. During the mature silent period, movies
acquired the status of a mass commercial entertainment,
with audience levels climbing throughout the 1920s,
especially in the latter part of the decade. Weekly paid
admissions in the United States jumped from 40 million
in 1922 to 65 million in 1928. In fact, it was film's very
popularity that prompted ongoing concern about its
effects on select audience members, children and youth
in particular. Various studies into filmgoing conducted
throughout the late 1910s and 1920s found that young
people constituted a sizable portion of the total audience
for motion pictures. The question of whether movie-
going had an adverse effect on the behavior of young
people was not easily answered; for every study that
denied the negative influence of the movies on children,
such as the chapter devoted to the topic in Phyllis
Blanchard's The Child and Society (1928), another found
statistical correlations between juvenile delinquency and
high rates of movie attendance, such as Alice Miller
Mitchell's Children and Movies (1929).

Data on the composition of movie audiences during
this period remain scattered and questionable, but some
studies indicated that a significant percentage of adult
members were female. The film scholar Gaylyn Studlar
has pointed out that, whether or not we accept as true the
figures putting the proportion of female movie patrons as
high as 80 percent, women were indeed seen as highly
desirable audience members precisely because of their
status as consumers. Fan magazines were pitched to
female readers, and the rapturous star-gazing fan was
imagined to be female, even if the reality was more
complicated. (For example, though press reports describ-
ing the hysterical reaction to Rudolph Valentino's

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(1895—1926) death emphasized the behavior of female
fans, newsreel footage shows just as many men in attend-
ance outside the funeral service as women.) On another
level, however, the steady evolution of movie culture that
accelerated throughout the mature silent era worked to
eliminate any distinctions among fans, suggesting that all
patrons had equal access to the grand fantasy represented
by Hollywood films and the stars who populated them.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the moving picture
palace, which came to define the era's aspirations and
set a standard for exhibition that would never be
surpassed.

The picture palace, renowned for its architectural
flights of fancy and sumptuous decor, encapsulated the
spirit of fantasy that moviegoing was designed to engen-
der. The opulence of these theaters alluded to the high
cultural realm of opera houses; architects consciously
emulated antiquated styles as well, mixing traditions
in a manner that intensified the idea that the ticket holder
was entering a realm free of constraints, either of expense
or history. In atmospheric theaters, stars might twinkle in
a cloud-bedecked ceiling; exoticism announced itself
through ersatz Mayan statuary or an elaborate staircase
modeled after French Renaissance originals. Oversized
lobbies were designed to engulf the senses (while also
solving the more prosaic problem of crowd flow), with
the amassed details of murals, lush drapery and carpeting,
chandeliers, and excessive displays of marble and bronze
announcing that patrons had stepped into a world distinct
from their normal, workaday lives. The epic that might be
shown onscreen would merely be an extension of the
spectacle already mounted within the theater itself.

If the films shown in picture palaces were dwarfed by
their surroundings, many viewers seemed not to mind.
Questionnaires designed to identify patrons' preferences
determined that the moviegoing experience often rated
more highly for audience members than the film on view.
Music in particular, but also comfort and beauty, out-
ranked the movies shown as the most appealing features
a theater had to offer. The grandest theaters offered
musical entertainment on a scale commensurate with
the decor: in addition to featured singers, and even a
stage show of sorts, one could count on an orchestra,
responsible for overtures as well as accompaniment for
the entirety of the program presented, which might
include a newsreel, a scenic, and a comedy short, all
preceding the main feature. Admission prices at picture
palaces were certainly higher than those charged at more
conventional theaters, topping out at over one dollar;
but patrons were gaining entry to an experience, replete
with a full array of service personnel, from doormen to
pages to ushers to nursemaids. If the movies transported
their viewers to another world, the picture palace aimed

to sustain that sensation until patrons had left the con-
fines of the theater.

RESISTANCE TO HOLLYWOOD

Although American films enjoyed unchallenged success
in the domestic market and dominated abroad, other
nations made their mark by offering a distinctive alter-
native to classicism. Though quite different in their
approaches to establishing unique forms of cinematic
expression, Germany, France, and the USSR each forged
national film movements during the 1920s, resulting in
a body of idiosyncratic films that could lay claim to the
status of art. These countries made conventional films in
abundance even as they sustained more experimental
works, but for the most part their legacy within the silent
period can be traced to German Expressionism, French
Impressionism, and Soviet montage, respectively.

Of the three countries, Germany's film industry was
the most developed and the most prolific. In the 1920s it
produced over two thousand feature films, and in 1923
German domination of its own market peaked for the
decade, with domestic films accounting for 60 percent of
the motion pictures screened in the country's cinemas.
Although the nation's intelligentsia had resisted involve-
ment with motion pictures until just prior to the war, the
postwar sentiment within the country encouraged greater
cross-fertilization among forms, and artists trained in
Expressionism embraced film as a means to extend
the visual experimentation of that art movement. The
jagged shapes, crude lines, and forced perspective of
Expressionist art was transposed onto the sets of the first
German Expressionist film, Das Kabinett des Doktor
Caligari {The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920). The
Expressionist approach also extended to the makeup
and performances of Caligari 's lead actors, reinforcing
the film's sense of pronounced stylization. Few of the
subsequent films linked to the movement replicated the
application of an Expressionist visual logic to the mise-en-
scene to the degree achieved by Caligari; nonetheless,
those films classified as Expressionist arguably managed
to adhere to the movement's general aim of rendering an
internal state through external means, albeit in a modi-
fied fashion. This is the case even in Nosferatu, eine
Symphonie des Grauens {Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau,
1922), which, unlike most Expressionist films, made
extensive use of outdoor locations for its treatment of
the vampire legend: rather than integrate Expressionist
touches into a fabricated mise-en-scine, Murnau poses the
actor playing Nosferatu in front of archways (creating
visual echoes with the vampire's coffin) or uses shadows
to further extend the already grotesque features of
the character's body. Fritz Lang's films from this
period, most spectacularly Metropolis (1927, and usually

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Max Schreck as the vampire in F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), which combined location photography with an
Expressionist design. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

considered the movement's swan song), employ large-
scale compositions which play up the geometricism evi-
dent in late period Expressionist art.

The distinctive look of German Expressionist pro-
ductions, especially the care exercised in set design and
lighting, were a direct outgrowth of Germany's updating
of its studio facilities and refinement of its filming tech-
niques, done with an eye to making its films desirable as
exports. The approach achieved its goal, as many German
productions, including historical epics (especially those
directed by Ernst Lubitsch [1892-1947]) and the less
grandiose kammerspiel ("intimate play") films, found
receptive audiences abroad. However, Germany's film
industry had been able to capitalize on a protected
domestic market and a devalued currency to undersell
its elaborate productions elsewhere; all this changed after
1924, with the stabilization of the mark and the lifting of

quotas on foreign imports. American films poured into
the country, overspending drove Ufa into debt, and
personnel began to migrate to Hollywood, a trend ini-
tiated by Lubitsch's departure in 1923. Though the film
industry recovered by the late twenties and experienced
renewed aesthetic success with a realist strain of street
films reflecting the influence of Neue Sachlichkeit (often
translated as the New Objectivity), particularly in the
works of G. W. Pabst (1885-1967), German filmmaking
failed to duplicate the ambitions — and achievements — of
the Expressionist period at the end of the 1920s.

The production situation in France differed radically
from that in Germany. No centralized production facili-
ties existed; filmmakers struggled to keep up with the
technological innovations marking the films coming
from the United States and Germany; the government
failed to institute a system of quotas to protect domestic

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producers, opting for disabling taxes on movie tickets
instead. In 1918 Pathe abandoned the vertically inte-
grated structure that had propelled it to success before
the war, opting out of production. The French filmmak-
ing landscape was populated with numerous marginal
independent companies, rendering it a particularly unsta-
ble environment; nonetheless, the artisanal approach to
production invested the director with much more control
than was possible in a system predicated on a detailed
division of labor. If nothing else, the unpredictability of
French film production offered possibilities for enterpris-
ing filmmakers to secure financing for projects of a less
conventional nature. Many of the film makers associated
with the Impressionist movement who emerged in post-
war France divided their time between experimental
works and more commercial projects. Those who
remained separate from the industrial mainstream, such
as Louis Delluc (1890-1924) and Dmitri Kirsanoff
(1899-1957), found themselves making films with dis-
tinctly limited means. Despite the uncertainties of the
production context, Impressionist filmmaking persisted
for over ten years.

Unlike the Expressionists, the Impressionist film-
makers were not directly influenced by any single art
movement. Instead, they were interested in exploring
the potential of the cinematic medium, particularly its
capacity for capturing the impressions that define the
essence of the world. Appealing to notions of photogenie,
which held that cinematic style could exercise a trans-
formative effect on the everyday, Impressionist film-
makers employed superimpositions, masks, filters,
distorting lenses, slow motion, varying shot scale, and
mobile framing to render cinematically the spirit of what
the camera recorded. More often than not, these techni-
ques were designed to convey character subjectivity,
emphasizing thought processes to a degree far in excess
of what less digressive Hollywood narratives allowed. A
moment in Kirsanoff 's Menilmontant (1926) is emblem-
atic of the Impressionist approach: as a character sits
reading, waiting for her sister to return, she loses con-
sciousness and the screen goes blurry, giving way to a
series of seemingly unrelated and superimposed images,
many in close-up, including a woman's naked torso, a
clock, cars on the street, and light pouring through a
window. This collection of impressions may convey the
sleeping woman's dream state or a more abstract syn-
thesis of events real and imagined within the sisters'
shared environment. Impressionist films traded on the
ambiguity such imagistic passages could produce.

Sequences like this approximated the condition of
cinema pur that some French filmmakers championed,
though other strains of French filmmaking, influenced by
Dadaism {Entr'acte, 1924), Cubism (Ballet mecanique,
1924), and Surrealism (Emak-Bakia, 1927), probably

came closer, abandoning narrative altogether as they
did. The heterogeneous nature of French filmmaking
led to a proliferation of experimental modes, with
Impressionism being only the most long-lasting. A desire
to reduce film to its basic elements, giving priority to
rhythm and lyricism, found its outlet in films that were
purely abstract in nature, including works by one of
France's most important female directors, Germaine
Dulac (1882-1942) (Themes et variations, 1928; and
Arabesque, 1929). The lyrical qualities of cinema pur also
bled over into one of the more striking international
developments of the late 1920s, the city symphony,
examples of which emerged out of France (Rien que les
heures [Nothing But Time], 1926), Germany (Berlin: Die
Sinfonie der Grofistadt [Berlin: Symphony of a Great City],
1927), the Netherlands (Regen [Rain], 1929) and the
USSR (Chelovek s kino-apparatom [The Man with a
Movie Camera], 1929).

The Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga
Vertov (1896-1954), was one of the most impressive
achievements of the late silent era and one of the final
examples of silent Soviet montage filmmaking, which
had been initiated in earnest only five years earlier. The
October Revolution of 1917 had necessitated a rebuild-
ing of the Soviet film industry from the ground up, as
many prerevolutionary filmmakers fled the country, tak-
ing their equipment and film stock with them. For the
first few years production levels were low, and most of
the films made were brief agitation-propaganda shorts.
The Bolshevik government, realizing the potential of film
to advance the prerogatives of the new regime, made
efforts to aid in its revitalization, first by putting the
Education Commisariat (or Narkompros) in charge of
overseeing filmmaking in 1917, and then, two years later,
by nationalizing the film industry. Also in 1919
Narkompros established a State Film School, where
fledgling director Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) began his
studies of editing, which would prove instrumental to the
development of montage filmmaking. The studies
Kuleshov conducted reinforced the idea that a film's
meaning lay in the combinations of shots rather than
the individual shots themselves. Though outstripped in
his theorizing of montage principles by later writers
whose ideas were both more complex and more radical,
including the directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei
Eisenstein (1898-1948), Kuleshov proved influential as
both a filmmaker and a teacher; among his students was
a key figure within the movement, Vsevolod Pudovkin,
who incorporated montage into stirring narratives, mak-
ing his films, such as Mat (Mother, 1926), popular at
home and abroad. Sustained feature production required
more than inspired tutelage, however — an infusion of cap-
ital was necessary.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Silent Cinema

BUSTER KEATON
b. Joseph Francis Keaton Jr., Piqua, Kansas, 4 October 1895, d. 1 February 1966

One of the greatest of silent-era comedians, Buster Keaton
fused the showmanship of his vaudeville training with an
understanding of how to stage complicated gags uniquely
able to exploit cinema's temporal and spatial parameters.
In doing so he created film comedy that indulged a
populist penchant for knockabout humor while also
revealing a modernist sensibility attuned to reflexive jokes
and an absurdist perspective. Part Keystone Kop, part
surrealist manque, Keaton and his image-based comedy
did not weather the transition to sound, but his artistry
won renewed recognition beginning in the 1950s, two
decades after his career experienced a precipitous decline.

A performer from the age of three, Keaton moved
into films by joining Fatty Arbuckle in the production of
nearly twenty two-reelers in the late teens. In these early
works Keaton established a way to translate vaudeville
stagecraft into cinematic comedy and also forged a
working relationship with the producer Joseph M.
Schenck that would last through the 1920s. In 1920
Keaton embarked on a series of shorts over which he
exercised creative control, resulting in a body of work
defined by its physical virtuosity and sustained ingenuity.
Two salient aspects of Keaton's comedy became enshrined
in these films: the seemingly fruitless battles with massive
objects, and the indomitable body of Buster. Diminutive
yet muscular, Keaton might have been crushed by
formidable forces; but despite constant buffeting he
refused to relent. His resilience was signaled by the Great
Stone Face, a visage that showed only glimmers of
emotion, the slight range all the more effective for the
subtle inflections it allowed.

From the disastrous house-in-a-box constructed in
One Week (1920) to the legion of police officers pursuing
Buster en masse in Cops (1922), Keaton's comedy derives

from the protagonist's finding himself in predicaments
that worsen in ever-multiplying ways. As the calamities
proliferate, Keaton stages the consequences with a
precision bordering on the geometric. Many of Keaton's
most famous gags — such as when a collapsing house front
fails to crush him because the open window frame
provides the perfect space through which his body emerges
unscathed — display a careful profilmic planning in the
paradoxical service of proving the capriciousness of chance.
As Keaton moved into feature-length filmmaking in the
mid- 1920s, the scale of the gags became even more
impressive and the fatalistic implications more palpable.
Buster's balletic grace, displayed in a variety of life-
threatening situations, be it avoiding a multitude of rolling
boulders, riding on the back of a driverless motorcycle, or
caught in the midst of a cyclone, was magnified by the epic
scale of the perils his body confronted. Human fragility
and sheer endurance were conveyed within the context of
the same gag.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), The Boat (1921),
Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The
Navigator (1924), The General (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr.
(1928)

FURTHER READING

Blesh, Rudi. Keaton. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
Horton, Andrew, ed. Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. Cambridge,

UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Knopf, Robert. The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Kramer, Peter. "Derailing the Honeymoon Express:

Comicality and Narrative Closure in Buster Keaton's The
Blacksmith." Velvet Light Trap 23 (1989): 101-116.

Charlie Keil

The Bolshevik government instituted the New
Economic Policy in 1921, which integrated modified
forms of capitalist endeavor into the communist system.
Since 1917 the USSR had basically been cut off from
other countries' products, but the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo
opened up trade between Russia and Germany, and soon
imports began to flow back into the Soviet Union. The

government was able to take advantage of the revenue
generated by these imports, especially once it set up an
effective state-run enterprise, Sovkino, early in 1925, to
control production and distribution. Slowly, state inter-
vention paid off, and production levels climbed. Equally
important, key films of the burgeoning Soviet montage
movement, most notably Eisenstein's Bronenosets

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Silent Cinema

Buster Keaton. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Potyomkin {Battleship Potemkin, 1925) proved effective as
exports, and Sovkino could begin to put money earned
from the sales to other markets back into domestic pro-
duction. By the late 1920s the USSR was producing as
many features as France, and Soviet films outnumbered
imports by two to one in the country's own theaters.

Although montage-based films constituted only a
portion of the USSR's feature output in the period from
1924 to 1929, they tended to be among the more high-
profile and influential of the films produced. Moreover,
the formal complexity of the films was wedded to an
overt ideological project: the transformation of the polit-
ical consciousness of the Soviet populace. In this the
montage films can be linked to Constructivism, a broader
artistic movement that defined many aspects of Soviet
postrevolutionary culture. A montage aesthetic pervaded
much Constructivist art, most evident in mixed-media
sculptural works and photocollages. Montage involved
the assemblage of heterogeneous elements or juxtaposi-
tion of fragments, the connection of which would pro-
duce a whole greater than the assorted parts. Accordingly,
art was likened to a machine, whose constituent parts
operated together in a dynamic fashion to create a

propulsive force capable of productive change. Being a
machine-based art form, cinema functioned as an
obvious testing ground for Constructivist principles.
Directors such as Eisenstein explored the various ways
in which shot combinations could produce measurable
effects on the spectator. Applying the Marxist concept of
the dialectic, Eisenstein favored a notion of montage that
depended on opposing elements coming into collision,
and producing in their interaction a synthesis that would
lay the groundwork for the next clash of opposites. He
also likened each shot to a cell, which reverberated with
the potential for montage. Placed into rapid juxtaposition
with other similarly charged shots, the cumulative effect
was one of revolutionary propulsion. One finds ample
demonstration of Eisenstein's theories in action in
Battleship Potemkin: early on in the film, Eisenstein con-
veys the potential for the sailors' rebellion through a
quick series of simple shots itemizing basic daily tasks
aboard the battleship. Each shot tends to be defined by a
dominant quality (a geometric shape or pointedly direc-
tional movement), such that rapid cutting from one to
the other produces a sense of agitation, until the action
climaxes in the famous sequence detailing a sailor
(dressed in a striped shirt) smashing a circular plate, this
singular action broken down into a short burst of ten
distinct shots.

As the Soviet government's attitude toward artistic
experimentation hardened near the close of the decade,
both Constructivist art and montage filmmaking found
themselves subject to charges of needless formalism.
Government officials questioned how the increasingly
abstract intellectual connections underlying shot combi-
nations in films such as The Man with a Movie Camera
and Eisenstein's Oktyabr {October and Ten Days That
Shook the World, 1927) could be understood by the
peasantry; eventually, filmmakers were forced to abandon
the modernist "excesses" of the montage movement.
Although direct government intervention was not always
responsible, the aesthetic ambitiousness of the late silent
cinema was arrested worldwide by the close of the dec-
ade, the main culprit being the introduction of sound.
From the mid-twenties onward, the medium underwent
a formal maturation, spurred in part by the increased
circulation of accomplished films, but also by a growing
sense of film's potential for artistry.

Even Hollywood, typically identified as driven by
commercial success over artistic aspirations, seemed to
reach new aesthetic heights in the years immediately
before the wholesale conversion to sound. In part, one
can attribute the flurry of masterworks to the presence of
European directors who had been lured to the studio
system, such as Lubitsch {So This Is Paris, 1926),
Murnau {Sunrise, 1926), Victor Sjostrom {The Wind,
1928), and Paul Fejos {Lonesome, 1928); but American

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Silent Cinema

directors also contributed, among them Buster Keaton
(1895-1966) {The General, 1927), Frank Borzage
(1893-1962) {Seventh Heaven, 1927), King Vidor {The
Crowd, 1928) and Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969) {The
Docks of New York, 1928). Theorists like Rudolf
Arnheim celebrated the unique aesthetic qualities of late
silent cinema, while the combined stylistic influence of
Expressionism, Impressionism, and montage resulted in
striking films from countries as disparate as England
(Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor, 1929) and
Japan (Teinosuke Kinugasa's Kurutta Ippeji [A Page of
Madness], 1926). The era's crowning achievement may
well be Carl Theodor Dreyer's (1889-1968) La Passion
de Jeanne dArc {The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), whose
stark compositions, unsettling editing patterns, and iso-
lated, closely scaled shots of its star, Maria Falconetti
(1892-1946), distill the spiritual struggle of Joan into a
concentrated portrait of intense emotion. Some would
say the film's extensive title cards indicated that cinema
was longing to speak; others would long for the purity
that the mute orchestration of complex images offered,
terminated by the headlong rush to incorporate sound in
the years to follow.

SEE ALSO Comedy; Documentary; Expressionism; France;
Genre; Germany; Great Britain; Narrative; Pre-
Cinema; Russia and Soviet Union; Shots; Slapstick
Comedy; Sound; Sweden; Star System; Stars; Studio
System; Technology; Ufa (Universum Film
Aktiengesellschaft); World War I

FURTHER READING

Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

, ed. Silent Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

Press, 1996.

Aitken, Ian. European Film Theory and Criticism: A Critical
Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1957.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Tilm Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.

de Cordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the
Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1990.

Grieveson, Lee, and Peter Kramer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader.
New York: Routledge, 2004.

Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The
Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Keil, Charlie, and Shelley Stamp, eds. American Cinema's

Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004.

Koszarski, Richard. An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the
Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. New York: Scribners,
1990.

Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity
in the Jazz Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Taylor, Richard. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the
World Film Market, 1907-1934. London: British Film
Institute, 1985.

Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History: An
Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Waller, Gregory, ed. Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the
History of Film Exhibition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Charlie Keil

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SLAPSTICK COMEDY

Slapstick is both a genre in its own right, belonging
mostly to the years of silent cinema, and an element in
other comedies that has persisted from the early years of
film till now, when it seems to be as an indispensable
element of the teen or "gross-out" comedy typified by
such films as the American Pie trilogy (1999, 2001, 2003)
and movies directed by the Farrelly Brothers, such as
There's Something About Mary (1998) and Stuck on You
(2003).

Slapstick is a descendent of the comic routines of
Italian commedia dell'arte (mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth
century) touring players, who developed basic plot sce-
narios and broad, swiftly drawn characters. The fun for
their audiences was not in watching innovative narratives
or well-developed characters but in seeing how a slick
troupe of professionals could manipulate the standard
components of farce — zany servants, pompous masters,
young lovers — with speed and efficiency. Each commedia
player performed and perfected a single stereotyped
character, bringing his own personality to bear in the
particulars of his comic business — the lazzi — or, as we
might call it, the shtick.

Comedy in slapstick lies in the basic tension between
control and its loss. Both the verbal outbursts of the
wordier comics (the Marx Brothers [Chico (1887—
1961), Harpo (1888-1964), Groucho (1890-1977),
and Zeppo (1901-1979)], W. C. Fields [1880-1946])
and the physical eruptions of those who use extreme
body comedy (Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977], Jerry
Lewis [b. 1926]) are predicated on the delicate balance
between resistance and inevitable surrender — indeed, the
resistance serves to make the surrender even funnier.
Slapstick's classic moment, the pie in the face, is funny

only if the recipient is not already covered in pie but is
first clean and neat; slipping on a banana skin provides
humor only when the before — the dignified march — is
contrasted with the after — the flat-out splayed pratfall on
the sidewalk. Slapstick comedians learned early on that
humor could be prolonged if resistance, whether to grav-
ity or another inevitability, could also be prolonged — in
other words, as long as there were a chance that the other
shoe might fall. This balancing act is the slapstick comic's
main job: paradoxically, when we watch him — and it is
usually a him — performing lack of control, at least part
of our pleasure derives from his skill at controlling this
lack.

Jim Carrey might beat himself up mercilessly in Me,
Myself And Irene (2000), but even as he seems to aban-
don restraint while punching himself, we are aware of the
physical control needed to perform this routine. Part of
the humor in this tension is also derived from the comic
hero's insistence on maintaining control when others
around him have abandoned it. Chaplin's Tramp tries
to maintain dignity even though poor, starving,
drenched, and an outcast: the humor lies in his scrupu-
lous adherence to social niceties (he holds his silverware
nicely) even when society is in chaos (he is having to
eat his own boot from starvation in The Gold Rush,
1925).

BACKGROUND

Slapstick comedy derives its name from the flat double
paddle (like a flattened, oversized Castanet) that, when
struck against another performer, produced a satisfyingly
big noise but only a small amount of actual discomfort.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Slapstick Comedy

MACK SENNETT
b. Richmond, Quebec, Canada, 17 January 1880,
d. Woodland Hills, California, 5 November 1960

It seems appropriate that Mack Sennett, the father of
slapstick comedy, made his first stage appearance as the
rear end of a pantomime horse at the Bowery Burlesque in
New York City. Responsible for inaugurating the
conventions of both custard pie-throwing and the comic
chase, Sennett's grasp of comedy was always physical
rather than verbal.

Born Michael Sinnott in Quebec, Sennett left Canada
for New England in his youth. Although opera was his
initial career goal, he pragmatically settled for a position in
burlesque, making his horse's-end debut in 1902. Sennett
enjoyed the rapid-fire dialogue and punishing physical
comedy of vaudeville and absorbed from this milieu many
lessons about gag-driven narratives, which inspired his
later films. In 1908, D. W. Griffith gave Sennett a job
acting in, and later writing and directing, Biograph
comedies. Eventually, Sennett decided to form a company
of his own, and after securing the financial backing of two
bookie friends, he lured away other Biograph players,
including his off-again, on-again fiancee and eventual star,
Mabel Normand, to form Keystone Pictures in 1912.

In his Keystone silent pictures, Sennett perfected
slapstick, physical comedy. It is to his credit that Sennett
could make his short films so successful at a time when
cinema was otherwise veering toward feature-length films
and more refined narrative- and character-based comedies.
The typical Sennett short featured stereotyped characters
drawn in broad strokes, who engaged in knockabout
routines resulting in pratfalls, custard pie fights, and
pursuits. These roles were played by such actors as Charlie
Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin,

and Gloria Swanson, all of whom began at Keystone.
Those flat-footed, uniformed incompetents, the Keystone
Kops, tried to catch stripe-suited convicts, the escalating
pace of their madcap antics inevitably culminating in a
chase that brought both law breakers and law keepers into
contact with the Keystone Bathing Beauties, a troupe of
swimsuited lovelies.

Sennett pioneered comedy features with Tillies
Punctured Romance (1914), starring Normand, but
mostly he kept to shorts, which showcased his mastery of
physical comedy at the expense of narrative and
character. Sennett's type of comedy which was motion,
not dialogue, -driven, was heavily affected by the
introduction of talkies: physical comedy proved to be ill-
served by the static cameras used in the early sound
years. Sennett did, however, continue to make films into
the mid- 1930s, including the famous W. C. Fields shorts
The Dentist (1932), The Pharmacist, and The Barber
Shop (both 1933).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Barney Oldfield's Race for Life (1913), Mabel's New Hero
(1913), Mabel at the Wheel (1914), Tillies Punctured
Romance (1914), Dough and Dynamite (1914)

FURTHER READING

Louvish, Simon. Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack
Sennett. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004.

Siegel, Scott, and Barbara Siegel. American Film Comedy from
Abbott and Costello to Jerry Zucker. New York: Prentice
Hall, 1994.

Tamar Jejfers McDonald

This battacio, or slapstick, traditionally wielded by male
performers, is said to have evolved from a symbolic
phallus (Chamberlain); certainly the habitual association
of slapstick comedy with male comics might be seen to
bear out this symbolism. While early cinema slapstick
boasted performers of both genders, including famous
slapstick queen Mabel Normand (1892-1930) (Tillie's
Punctured Romance, 1914), early flapper Colleen Moore
(1900-1988) (Ella Cinders, 1926), and heroines of the
1930s screwball comedy genre, such as Carole Lombard

(1908-1942) {Twentieth Century, [1934] and Nothing
Sacred, [1937]), who was not afraid to take pratfalls
amidst the glossy art deco sets of the genre, almost all
major slapstick comedians since then have been male.
Perhaps there is a reluctance on the part of female come-
dians to align themselves with a form of humor that relies
so much on mess, violence, and pain; when female com-
ics become involved in slapstick's routine business of
physical humiliation this seems to be more as a punish-
ment than a chosen route. For example, in Doris Day's

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Slapstick Comedy

Mack Sennett. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

inanimate objects that seemed to possess wills of their
own, as in Chaplin's One A.M. (1916), in which the
comedian encounters a malicious wall bed.

Many of the early slapstick film performers learned
their comic timing, troupe playing, swift setups, and
knockabout delivery of gags in this vaudeville milieu.
Mack Sennett (1880-1960), the Marx Brothers, and
W. C. Fields began their careers "treading the boards"
and carried the lessons learned in this noisy and volatile
arena into their film comedy. Sennett himself moved
from performing to producing and directing; he gave
many slapstick comedians their start in film at his
Keystone Studio, established in 1912, the first and most
successful specialist film-production unit. There, Sennett
employed comedians such as Normand, Charlie Chaplin,
Harold Lloyd (1893-1971), Buster Keaton (1895-1966),
Harry Langdon (1884-1944), and Roscoe "Fatty"
Arbuckle (1887-1933). Later, after the coming of sound,
W. C. Fields and Bing Crosby (1903-1977) were part of
his stable of slapstick comedians. Sennett is credited with
inventing the custard pie fight and with realizing the
comic potential of the chase; the typical Sennett film
ends with one, in which Kops, Bathing Beauties, stripe-
clad convicts, passers-by, and dogs careen across the
screen, fall over, collide, and generally create mayhem.

1950s and 1960s films, the comedienne is often the butt
of elaborate slapstick jokes that revolve around besmirch-
ing her habitual cleanliness and purity: she is dunked in
mud {Calamity Jane, 1953), ketchup {The Thrill Of It
All, 1963), and sudsy water {Move Over, Darling, 1963).
Lucille Ball was one of the few genuine slapstick come-
diennes of that era, less in her films than in her television
series, I Love Lucy (1951-1957).

The very physical style of comedy engendered by
commedia dell'arte influenced later theatrical styles,
including pantomime and circus, and persisted in the
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vaudeville,
with its emphasis on swift, gag-based knockabout com-
edy. For American audiences in the large new industrial
centers that supported vaudeville theatres, comedy could
succeed only when it was able to reach and please the
widest possible audience; thus physical comedy prevailed
over verbal humor, which depended on the audience's
shared language skills. Early cinema, too, relied on imme-
diately appreciable setups, clearly drawn characters, and
physical humor that did not rely on language (intertitles)
to reach the widest demographic. Many early films fur-
ther tapped into situations with which new city dwellers
could readily identify. Their humor derived from the
perils of modern life, including vehicles, machinery, and

SOUND AND AFTER

For James Agee, slapstick was dealt its death blow as a
viable comic form by the talkies. The coming of sound
required, at least initially, a more static camera, which
slowed the comic antics on screen to a less frenzied pace.
Other film theorists, such as Steve Neale and Frank
Krutnik, however, disagree, and suggest that slapstick
was already a marginal subgenre by the time of what is
considered its heyday, from about 1912 through 1930.
As a "low" form of humor, slapstick fell out of step with
dominant tastes, which were moving toward a more
genteel comedy of manners in order to find favor with
middle-class audiences, which filmmakers were begin-
ning to court. By itself, sound could not kill slapstick,
which relied on a combination of physical and verbal
comedy; rapid-fire patter was a major part of the Marx
Brothers' art, along with pratfalls and consequence-free
violence. The Three Stooges, too, while not known for
word twisting and puns, did employ pig Latin, verbal
insults, and nicknames along with eye poking and hair
pulling.

Like commedia performers, the Marx Brothers and
the Three Stooges remind us that slapstick is ensemble
comedy, each performer bringing a particular character
to life, repeating and refining this persona's idiosyncratic
lazzi in every performance. Slapstick comics, especially
after the arrival of sound, have tended to work in pairs

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Slapstick Comedy

■

foOIR CHIEF 1

■

The Keystone Cops, with Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and Fatty Arbuckle c. 1913. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

rather than as troupes of three or more: Stan Laurel
(1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957), Bob
Hope and Bing Crosby, Bud Abbott (1895-1974) and
Lou Costello (1906-1959), and Jerry Lewis and Dean
Martin exploited the comic tensions between a straight
man and a gag guy, a natural winner and an all-time
loser, a matinee idol and a clown. Lewis, with or without
Martin, is considered the preeminent performer of post-
silent slapstick. His willingness to reduce himself to a
state of infantile idiocy — spastic limbs and primitive
language — proved hugely popular in the 1 960s with both
American audiences and French critics.

While slapstick can be seen to have lost its domi-
nance as a solo comic mode (except in cartoons where
it continues to be honored — see, for example, The
Simpsons (beginning 1989) — it can still be found as a
component of many other forms of comedy, including
genteel strands of humor, such as romantic comedy, and

the subgenre that most resembles its earlier incarnation,
the new teen 'gross-out' comedy. Whenever a romantic
heroine finds herself so dizzy with love or the need for
revenge that she walks into an office plant (Sandra
Bullock in Two Weeks' Notice, 2000) or pours coffee over
her white business suit (Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold,
2001), the film is invoking the conventions of slapstick
comedy to remind us of the basic (and loveable) idiocy of
people in love. Jim Carrey has built entire film vehicles
around the body torsions and physical violence of this
genre, making him Jerry Lewis's purest heir.

While slapstick interludes in contemporary com-
edies are now less likely to end with a chase, which
seemed inevitable in the era of silent slapstick, they
continued to be used through the 1960s to create a
modern "swinging" feel that married contemporary
comedy to slapstick traditions — for example, in the
finales of Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Modesty

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Slapstick Comedy

Blaise (1966), and almost the whole of It's a Mad, Mad,
Mad, Mad World (1963). Silent slapstick persists in
modern films, including its emphasis on consequence-
free violence, humiliation, and physical pain. Archetypal
characters similarly endure: the good-natured but phy-
sically and/or romantically inadequate hero; the phy-
sically superior but morally inferior jock, who is the
hero's rival for the good girl; the demanding, ill-
tempered boss, who is either revealed to have a heart
of gold and a sense of humor after all or who is symboli-
cally castrated. Alongside this basic romance plot may
stand another thread, either subordinate or dominant,
involving fast-talking, wise-guy con men linked to the
tradition of slapstick ensembles. For example, the con
men conspiring to win Cameron Diaz's Mary in the
Farrelly Brothers comedy are the heirs to the Marx
Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and perhaps Bugs
Bunny. Although slapstick iconography may have left
behind the custard pie per se, similar use is now made of
more taboo matter: the bodily fluids and wastes of the
gross-out movie, whether the semen hair gel in There's
Something About Mary or the excremental smoothie in
The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999).

SEE ALSO Comedy; Early Cinema; Genre; Silent Cinema

FURTHER READING

Agee, James. "Comedy's Greatest Era." The Film Comedy Reader,
edited by Gregg Rickmann, 14-28. New York: Limelight
Editions, 2001.

Bonila, Paul. "Is There More to Hollywood Lowbrow than
Meets the Eye?" Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2005)
22: 17-24.

Chamberlain, Kathleen. "The Three Stooges and the Commedia
dell' Arte." The Tilm Comedy Reader, edited by Gregg
Rickmann, 53-59. New York: Limelight Editions, 2001.

Dale, Alan. Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American
Movies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Gehring, Wes. Personality Comedians as Genre. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1997.

Krutnik, Frank. Inventing Jerry lewis. Washington, DC, and
London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Neale, Steve, and Frank Krutnik. "The Case of Silent Slapstick."
In Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, edited by Frank
Krutnik, 57-71. London: Routledge, 2003.

Tamar Jejfers McDonald

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

SOUND

Cinema is classically described as a visual medium. But
turn off the audio as you watch a movie, and you will
grasp the centrality of sound — speech, sound effects (all
nonvocal noises), and music — to the telling of stories on
film. It is the interaction of sound with image that gives
films much of their depth and solidity, emotion and
meaning. Yet sound tends to be unnoticed, "invisible,"
when it stays within the norms and conventions of
Hollywood filmmaking. The paradox of film sound is
that it takes great artifice to produce the sounds that
apparently emanate from sources onscreen, seeming so
natural that we take them for granted.

"Illusionism" describes the dominant aesthetic of
mainstream film: technique is hidden, made invisible,
so as to give the impression that we are looking into a
real world and do not have to be conscious of camera
operators, flubbed lines, editors — all the work that con-
stitutes the production of this illusion. To be sure, sound
is not the only arena of classical filmmaking technique
that subordinates its presence so as not to distract us from
immersion in the narrative. There is a vital difference
between sound and image in regard to transparency,
however, because filmgoers are more conscious as viewers
than as listeners. Whereas we notice most everything in
the frame, we rarely notice most sounds (in life or in
film). As a result, film sounds can be manipulated to
depart from realistic standards to a much greater extent
than images.

THE COMING OF SOUND

Before anyone had made a single film, Thomas Edison
(1847-1931) decreed in 1888 that the phonograph and

the motion picture would come together. Early attempts,
such as Cameraphone (c. 1908-1909) and Britain's
Cinephone (c. 1910-1913), recorded voice in playback
to the image. Edison's own Kinetophone in 1913 applied
mechanical amplification to a recording horn to place
it out of camera range. This enabled sound (recorded on
a phonograph) and picture to be recorded at the same
time, but sync was dependent upon the operator's ability
to advance or retard the picture, and the sound was
described as "screeching."

As phonograph-based systems came and went, the
possibility that sound waves might be photographed
alongside the images, always in "sync," gained strength
in the laboratory. Sound would have to be converted to
electricity and electricity converted to light, modulated as
it struck the photosensitive emulsion. The prior discovery
that the electrical resistance of selenium varied in pro-
portion to light shone on it suggested that audio inform-
ation on film could be recovered with a light beam and
photoelectric cell. Eugene Lauste (1856-1935) in 1910
combined sound and picture on the same strip of film
but lacked the resources to commercialize his inventions.

The person most responsible for sound-on-film was
the independent inventor Theodore Case (1889-1944).
Joined by Earl Sponable (1895-1977) in 1916, he
worked with combinations of rare earths and inert gases
to produce a glow tube called the Aeo Light. Light
impulses were concentrated through a slit onto film and
registered as lines of black or gray. Case's system was
exploited by audio pioneer Lee de Forest under the name
Phonofilm in 1923. Phonofilm shorts, produced mainly
in 1923 and 1924, included big-name vaudeville acts
and Max Fleischer's (1883-1972) musical cartoons.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

Phonofilm, which solved problems of sync and employed
electronic amplification, seemed to have everything going
for it. Against it were lack of interest from the industry,
visual dullness, less than perfect reproduction, and de
Forest's legal and financial difficulties.

Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T, acquired
rights in 1912 to de Forest's 'Audion," a three-element
vacuum tube in which a smaller current regulated a larger
current, the basis of electronic amplification. A vacuum
tube of its own design went into the amplifiers that made
possible coast-to-coast telephone transmission in 1915.
As part of a general expansion of non-telephone uses of
audio in 1916, Western Electric began work on a con-
denser microphone with a vacuum tube preamplifier, a
crucial advance in sound collection, then limited to
acoustic horns or the carbon button telephone mouth-
piece. In 1919 a project was initiated for a new type of
phonograph turntable and tone arm with implications
for sound pictures. The disc had to have a playing time
equal to the then-standard 1,000-foot film reel. Silent
film nominally operated at sixteen frames per second, but
cameras were hand cranked at rates up to twenty-one
frames per second and were sped up in projection.
Western Electric used tachometers to determine that the
average actual projection speed was ninety feet per
minute, or twenty-four frames per second. A 1,000-foot
reel lasted eleven minutes. A sixteen-inch disc, rotating
at 33 1/3 rpm, matched it. Sync was perfected in test
films made during 1923. A sound film was produced in
1924. The multiple defects of previous systems demon-
strated that in order to solve any of the problems, it was
necessary to solve all of them. As the largest corporation
in the world, AT&T had the resources to develop a
complete package: condenser microphone; microphone
mixer; disc recorder; amplifiers for recording and play-
back; turntable synchronized to the projector by reliable
electronic and mechanical connections; and a horn-type
speaker.

Western Electric offered its sound-on-disc system to
an indifferent film industry. Warner Bros., then a sec-
ond-tier company that looked to expand, needed a com-
petitive edge. One way to gain bookings would be to
provide small-city theaters with the kind of symphonic
score available at deluxe movie palaces, where the feature
was preceded by songs, organ solos, even ballet. If
Warner's could provide these "canned," it might even
gain access to the theaters of its competitors, who were
burdened by the overhead of live performance.
Agreement was reached in June 1925 to develop what
Warner's named Vitaphone. Its intent was not to produce
talking features. What it had in mind was best exempli-
fied by the Vitaphone premiere program of 6 August
1926. A spoken introduction by movie "czar" Will H.
Hays was followed by an overture and six shorts, three

with Metropolitan Opera stars. The feature picture,
Don Juan (1926), was accompanied by a recorded score
punctuated by rudimentary sound effects.

Case and Sponable severed ties with de Forest and
made improvements intended to render Phonofilm obso-
lete. The sound attachment, formerly above the projec-
tor, was moved below with sound pickup twenty frames
ahead of the corresponding picture, the subsequent
worldwide standard. Fox Film, another second-tier com-
pany that looked to move into the top rank, formed the
Fox-Case Corporation in July 1926. Western Electric's
"sound speed" of ninety feet per minute was adopted for
its first commercial entertainment short, starring singer
Raquel Meller (1888-1962) and produced in November
1926. Public showings of Movietone, as the Fox-Case
system came to be called, began in 1927.

Western Electric offered Warner Bros, the choice
between sound-on-disc and a developmental sound-on-
film system that the former rated as comparable (but
which Case judged inferior to Movietone). The appeal
of sound-on-disc was familiar technology. The discs were
pressed by Victor, the leading record label. Movietone
required precise exposure, processing, and printing.
Vitaphone's turntable ran at constant speed while the
Case reproducer had "wow" and "flutter." Sound-on-
film had better frequency response but also more noise
due to grain in the emulsion. Records could arrive at the
theater cracked or broken, they wore out after twenty
playings, and the operator might put on the wrong disc.
If the film broke, damaged frames had to be replaced by
black leader to restore sync. Sound-on-film was easily
spliced, but words were lost and a jump in the image
was followed by a delayed thump from the track.
Western Electric manufactured equipment for both sys-
tems and all its sound-on-film installations could also
play disc.

Throughout 1927, audiences were exposed to musi-
cal and comedy shorts and symphonic scores for the
occasional feature. In May they were thrilled by the
sound of the engine of the Spirit of St. Louis as Charles
Lindbergh (1902-1974) took off for Paris, then by the
voice of Lindbergh himself upon his return, a foretaste of
the regular issuance of Movietone newsreels beginning in
October. Then came The Jazz Singer on 6 October 1927
at Warner's Theatre in New York. It was not the first
sound film. It was not even Al Jolson's first appearance
for Vitaphone; he uttered his newly prophetic catch
phrase, "You ain't heard nothin' yet!" in the 1926 short,
A Plantation Act. But it was the first feature with
synchronized song and speech. For most of its eighty-
eight minutes, it was a silent film with a "canned"
orchestral score formed of the usual classical excerpts.
In the role of a Jew torn between show business and

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

the religious vocation of his father, a famous cantor,
Jolson delivered dynamic performances of five popular
songs in four sequences that totaled about thirteen
minutes and, by contrast, "Kol Nidre," a prayer. The
greatest impact came as Jolson, after singing a "straight"
version of "Blue Skies" to his mother, engaged in partly
scripted, partly improvised patter, followed by a "jazzy"
version. A single word — "stop" — uttered by the actor
who played his father marked the first time speech
affected a film's story line.

Singin' in the Rain (1952) portrays the coming of
sound with the force of cliche. The head of Monumental
Pictures, fresh from The Jazz Singer, strides onto a set,
halts production, and announces to the bewildered cast
and crew that the company will henceforth make only
talking pictures. In reality, Paramount head Adolph
Zukor (1873-1976) predicted that it would take five
years for sound to prove itself. The major companies
adopted a public stance of "wait-and-see" and a private
one of resistance. The "Big Five," dominated by
Paramount and Loew's/MGM, had agreed to hold off
until they could unite on one system. Vitaphone, an early
contender, faded when Western Electric announced an
improved light valve. Whereas Movietone used variable
light through a fixed slit, the light valve used constant
light through a variable slit, formed by vibrating wire
"strings." Both produced a "variable density" track. The
other candidate, RCA's Photophone, used a rotating
mirror to modulate the light beam. This produced a
sawtooth or "variable area" track, part of which was cut
off on Western Electric equipment until they were made
compatible.

Warners had no plans for another talking feature and
kept to its original idea of short subjects and "canned"
music even as attendance at The Jazz Singer swelled. In
February 1928 Warners started work on a short that was
allowed to grow into the first "all-talking" picture: Lights
of New York, released in July. With The Jazz Singer held
over for an unprecedented eighth or ninth week in cities
around the nation in March 1928, the other companies
settled on Western Electric's system. Loew's/MGM,
Paramount, United Artists, and First National all signed
on 15 May, followed by Universal and Columbia a
month later. The disc system was already seen as awk-
ward for production, though it survived as a release
format for disc-only theaters into the 1930s. RCA had
to go into the movie business itself as RKO (Radio-
Keith-Orpheum)

Although it was claimed then that audiences pre-
ferred a good silent film to mediocre "talkers," Lights of
New York (made for $23,000 and barely an hour long)
took in $1 million. Jolson's second feature, The Singing
Fool, released in September 1928, had more sound than

his first (about 75 of 105 minutes), played in more
theaters, and made more money: an amazing $5 million
against The Jazz Singers $2 million. These and other
successes lifted Warner Bros, into first place in the industry.

For the moviegoer, change unfolded in stages. All
but a few 1928 releases were still mute. In the second half
of the year, many were "synchronized" with music tracks
and sound effects. Sound sequences were added to some
films already in production or even completed. The first
half of 1929 was the heyday of the "part-talking" picture,
with synchronous sound in perhaps 40 percent of the
running time. Fox's decision to eliminate silent films
seemed bold in March 1929. In May, Paramount's
Zukor declared the silent film dead. By mid- 1929, the
"all-talking" picture had taken hold. Out of 582 films
released in 1929, some 335 were "all-talking." About
half of those were also released in silent versions.

Most countries had not yet made even one sound
feature. Western Electric and RCA established themselves
in Britain at the outset. They were met in Europe by
Tobis-Klangfilm, a combine that, like RCA/RKO, was
set up to produce films and supply equipment. Tobis
held patents issued from 1919 to 1923 on the German
Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system for which prior inven-
tion was claimed. An agreement of June 1930 smoothed
the way for US films in Europe but squabbles over
patents and royalties went on for years.

LATER DEVELOPMENTS

Early sound film production encountered many chal-
lenges. Camera noise required each camera and operator
to be placed in a soundproof booth or "sweat box." The
dependence of sound-on-disc upon a level surface, tem-
perature control, and a dust-free environment for the wax
record gave sound-on-film an edge. Fox took Movietone
outdoors for its first all-talking picture, In Old Arizona
(1928). In 1930 the camera booth gave way to the
"blimp," a wooden enclosure for the camera body, or
to the "barney," a padded quilt. In 1928 microphones
were concealed on the set in lamps, vases, flowerpots,
candlestick telephones, or overhead light fixtures, another
cause of camera stasis. But by 1929 microphones were
suspended from booms, sometimes hitting actors in the
head. Omnidirectional microphones had to be kept close
to the actors in order not to pick up unwanted sounds.
Directors asked for microphones that could be aimed at
the person actually speaking. Bidirectional microphones,
and some that claimed to be unidirectional, appeared in
the 1930s, with true unidirectional microphones offered
in 1941.

When critics complain about the lack of camera
mobility in early sound films, they are not talking just
about literal movement (most shots in silent films were

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

made from a tripod) but about the lost facility with
which the scenes had been structured through camera
angles with time compressed or expanded by editing.
Sound pulled movies away from cinematic time and
toward real time. Most scenes were shot with multiple
cameras and a single audio recording. Warner's On Trial
(1928) was derided for the long shot of the courtroom.

It was possible to edit sound-on-disc by means of
interlocked turntables that could be cued to specific
grooves, but that process was meant to assemble several
scenes onto one disc, not shots within scenes. Sound-on-
film had an obvious advantage in that it could be spliced.
By 1932 most scenes were made with a single camera.
The "master scene" would be filmed all the way through
as in a play. The close-ups, reactions, and over-the-
shoulder shots would then be filmed separately and
miked accordingly. All studios (including Warner,
which dropped sound-on-disc in March 1930) recorded
a separate strip of film in a "sound camera." To cut
sound apart from the picture, yet in sync with it,
Moviola added a sound reader to its editing consoles in
1928. In the 1930s they could run two and three sound
tracks.

"Rerecording," the combination of production and
postsynchronized sound, steadily improved. King Kong
(1933), with complex sound effects and speech at the
same time, and a score that "catches" individual lines of
dialogue, would have been impossible even eighteen
months earlier. Rerecording put an end to the produc-
tion of "foreign" versions as the dialogue could be
dubbed with sound effects and music retained.

In 1947 a new recording medium became available:
sprocketed film coated with magnetic iron oxide. It was
estimated that by 1951, 75 percent of recording, editing,
and mixing in Hollywood was done on magnetic track.
Lightweight recorders such as the Nagra that used 1/4-
inch magnetic tape with a "sync pulse" from the camera
appeared in the 1950s and gained wide use in the
1960s. On the postproduction side, the early dubbing
machinery used the old film transports retrofitted with
magnetic heads. Because a gap or click could be heard
where the recording stopped and resumed, films were still
mixed the old way, that is, in 1,000-foot reels. A mistake
lost all the work to that point. Advances in electronics in
about 1969 enabled "backup," or "rock 'n' roll," where
the new recording could be superimposed on the end of
the old.

The wide-screen upheaval of the 1950s brought
magnetic stereo into theaters. CinemaScope offered left,
center, and right channels behind the screen and a "sur-
round" channel in the auditorium from four stripes of
magnetic oxide on the 35mm print. Todd-AO's six-track
70mm format (five speakers behind the screen plus

surround) set the standard for deluxe presentations. In
1976, noise reduction technology made it possible to
derive four-channel stereo from a pair of mono-compatible
optical tracks, popularly known as "Dolby." The 1990s
saw three types of digital sound: Dolby Digital and SDDS
on the film itself and the disc-based DTS system.

SOUND AESTHETICS AND PRACTICE

Sound's constructed nature and the wide variety of rela-
tionships it can have to the image give sound great
expressive potential — even within an illusionistic aes-
thetic. Characteristics of film sound that allow it to be
manipulated include selectivity, nonspecificity, and
ambiguity.

• Selectivity. We expect images to behave
realistically; even if the characters are space
aliens, we expect them to follow the laws of
physics. However, in order for us not to notice
sound, it has to be used in ways that are quite
unrealistic. In the real world we are assaulted by
sounds from all around us, but the brain tends
to filter out those that are unimportant to us at a
given moment. The microphone is not as
selective; the filmmakers have to eliminate that
cacophony for us. By convention, the film
soundtrack is constructed so as not to draw
attention to itself unless it is part of the plot.
Thus, if a character looks directly at a ticking
clock, we may hear the ticking. But a few
seconds after the character looks away, the
ticking will be gradually dropped out. Another
convention of sound editing is that the dialogue
is emphasized over the other sound tracks (that
is, the effects and the music). Dialogue is usually
kept intelligible even in situations where we
would normally strain to hear someone
speaking. In a party scene, the lead couple may
be introduced via a long shot amidst crowd and
hubbub, but once the camera moves in closer,
the sounds of the other participants will
normally be minimized or cut out altogether.
What we hear mimics the psychological
attention of the couple rather than the physical
reality of the scene.

• Nonspecificity. Yet another difference between
image and sound is that noises, like music, can
be abstract, or at least nonspecific; we can
usually recognize an image, but we cannot
always tell what is causing a given sound. Thus,
crackling cellophane can be used to simulate
either fire or rain. In the 1990s it became
common to add animal roars beneath the

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

RENE CLAIR
b. Paris, France, 11 November 1898, d. 15 March 1981

Rene Clair epitomized the ambiguous relationship many
filmmakers had with sound in the transition-to-sound
period between 1928 and 1933. Whereas others like Ernst
Lubitsch, Jean Vigo, and Rouben Mamoulian pushed the
boundaries of the new technology, experimenting in a
variety of styles, Clair initially stood among those who
believed that sound would constrain the possibilities of
film as a visual medium. He was hesitant to embrace
sound because it increased production costs and because
the industrialized cinematic practices that it introduced
would jeopardize directorial control. In addition, he feared
that making the camera subservient to the recording
equipment would sacrifice the cinematic primacy of the
image. For Clair, sound had to complement the image,
not regulate it.

Clair's first sound film, Sous les toits de Paris (Under
the Roofs of Paris, 1930), features music as a
characterization and atmospheric device, minimal use of
dialogue, and an almost complete absence of natural
sounds. Interested in the nonsynchronous relationship
between sound and image, Clair avoids using sound to
express information already given by the image. As an
alternative, he explored their disjunction for comedic
purposes. In the film's climatic fight scene, when a
streetlight is broken and the screen goes dark, Clair does
not resort to the musical score. Instead, he uses vocal and
bodily sounds as a way to express the eruption of physical
violence into the story. In A Nous la liberte (Freedom for
Us, 1931) Clair, while still experimenting with
asynchronous sound and image, employed the musical
score to mark the narrative incursion of fantasy into the
story and as an ironic commentary on the action.

His first English-language film, The Ghost Goes West
(1935), marks a significant shift in Clair's approach to
film sound. Writing the screenplay with American
playwright Robert E. Sherwood, he became fully aware of
the cinematic possibilities of speech. In fact, the film is
closer to American dialogue-based humor than any of his
previous endeavors. I Married a Witch (1942) fully
immersed Clair in the screwball comedy genre, leaving
behind the visually poetic style of his French period.

Clair returned to France in 1945 to make his most
significant work, Les Belles de Nuit (Beauties of the Night,
1952), a return to his previous sound-image experiments.
The film's protagonist, Claude, can only distinguish between
dream and reality by trying to make a noise. The
conspicuously noiseless worlds of his dreams metaphorically
point to the inexhaustible possibilities of film as a visual
medium that sound technology had partially restricted.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Sous les toits de Paris ( Under the Roof of Paris, 1 930) , A Nous la
liberte (Freedom for Us, 1931), The Ghost Goes West
(1935), Les Belles de Nuit (Beauties of the Night, 1952)

FURTHER READING

Clair, Rene. Cinema Yesterday and Today. Edited by R. C.
Dale. New York: Dover, 1972. Translation by Stanley
Applebaum of Le Cinema d'hier, cinema d'aujourd'hui
(1970).

Dale, R. C. The Films of Rene Clair. Metuchen, NJ:

Scarecrow Press, 1986.
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
McGerr, Celia. Rene Clair. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega

sounds of inanimate objects such as trucks, fires,
or haunted houses to make them feel more
ominous. The audience, unaware of the
unrealistic sounds, nevertheless feels threatened
as if by a living beast.

• Ambiguity. Lack of specificity can mean that a
sound can suggest more than one interpretation
at once; it can be deliberately ambiguous. In

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), a
clicking sound in a park at night can be
interpreted as a snapped twig, a clicked camera
shutter, or a gun being cocked. Each possibility
suggests a different reality and interpretation. In
this case, we are meant to notice the sound, but
its multiplicity of interpretations extends the
film's metaphysical theme about the

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

Rene Clair during production of Les Belles de Nuit
(Beauties of the Night, 1952). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

unknowability of reality. The opening of
Apocalypse Now ( 1 979) brilliantly exploits the
similarity of sounds by shifting subtly between
ceiling fan and helicopter "whups" and traffic
noises and bird calls to indicate that while the
protagonist is cooped up in a Saigon hotel, his
mind is still in the jungle.

Like music, sound effects (and to a lesser extent,
dialogue) speak to the emotions. Take the "simple"
sound of footsteps as a character is seen walking onscreen.
Choices in reverberation, pacing, timbre, volume, and
mixing (of sounds with each other) may not only deter-
mine our sense of the physical contours of the space in
which the character is walking, but suggest any number
of feelings — loneliness, authority, joy, paranoia — in com-
bination with the images. These choices — rarely noticed
by the audience — are characteristics mainly imparted to
the sounds not during production, but once the shooting
stops.

Separation defines sound practices in many senses.
For one thing, sound and image are recorded onto sep-
arate mediums. For another, the personnel involved in
different units may never meet. The production mixer

(set recordist) rarely interacts with the editing (postpro-
duction) staff. And on a major production, dialogue,
sound effects, and music are handled by discrete depart-
ments, which may remain independent of one another.

Normally, little sound other than dialogue is cap-
tured during filming. Yet even here, microphone type
and placement can affect the tonal quality of a voice.
Production dialogue is best taken with a microphone
suspended on a boom above the actors just outside of
the camera's frame line. This placement preserves the
integrity of the original performance and maintains aural
perspective in rough correspondence to the camera angle.
When booms are not feasible, the actors can be fitted
with radio mikes, small lavalieres connected to radio
frequency transmitters concealed in clothing. These
microphones sacrifice perspective and vocal quality for
invisibility. Locations are scouted for visual impact;
unless production assistants can reroute traffic and shut
down air-conditioning systems, the audio environment
may prove unconquerable. Under budget and schedule
pressures, audio aesthetics are often sacrificed and some
production sound is kept only as a "guide track" on the
assumption that it can be "fixed in the mix."

Production mixers normally ask that all action cease
for a few moments on each location so that they may
record ambient sound or room tone, the continuous
background sound (such as water lapping) in that space.
Editors will later have to reinsert ambience under dia-
logue and effects created during postproduction for
continuity with production sound. The sound crew
may also take some "wild" sound (such as foghorns),
not synchronized to any shot, for possible use as authen-
tic sound effects.

Sound recording mediums have evolved rapidly
in the digital age. Analog recording on 1/4-inch tape
was supplanted in part by digital audiotape (DAT),
which in turn was replaced by sound recorders with
removable hard discs that can be directly transferred
into computer work stations for editing. Methods of
maintaining and establishing sync (precisely matching
sound and image) have also evolved. To enable the
editor to match voice and lip movement, the take was
traditionally "slated" (numbered on a small blackboard
held in front of the camera) and announced vocally by
an assistant director, who then struck the hinged clapper
stick for a sync point. Although slating is still done,
now a time code is used to sync camera and recorder
electronically.

Actors and directors almost always prefer to record
dialogue directly on the set. During production the dia-
logue is synced up overnight with the image so that the
filmmakers can select the best takes by evaluating vocal
performance as well as visual variations. Later, specialized

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

Rene Clair experimented with a musical score in A Nous la liberte (Freedom for Us, 1931). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

dialogue editors will make minute adjustments to salvage
as much of the dialogue as possible. They eliminate
extraneous noises and may combine parts of words from
different takes or even scenes to replace a single flawed
word.

Although intelligibility is the usual priority for dia-
logue, it can be manipulated, perhaps by increasing
reverberation or volume, to characterize someone as men-
acing. But the main choices involve how dialogue is
edited in relation to picture. To show "talking heads"
can be redundant and boring. The picture editor's choice
of when to shift between speaker and listener not only
alters emotional identification but allows us to learn
information simultaneously from one character's facial
expression and the other's vocal inflection.

Any dialogue that cannot be polished or could not
be captured at all during production is recorded during

postproduction in a process called looping, or ADR
(automated dialogue replacement). The actor repeatedly
watches the scene that needs dialogue, while listening to a
guide track on headphones, and then reperforms each line
to match the wording and lip movements. Computers can
imperceptibly stretch or shorten words to adjust a phrase
that is not quite in sync.

While some sound effects are recorded during pro-
duction, most are added or created later. "Spotting"
sessions are held to determine what kinds of sounds are
needed and where scoring will be heard. Some sounds
that must be in sync are performed by a foley artist.
Foleying is the looping of sound effects in a specialized
studio outfitted with various walking surfaces and props.
Sometimes called foley walkers because so much of their
work consists of adding footsteps, foley artists create

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Sound

sounds by moving their bodies or props as they watch the
image. Often their props do not match the original
objects. A feather duster may simulate not only a flock
of birds, but also leaves blowing along the street. A kiss is
still just a kiss in filmmaking, but its sound may be
recorded by a foley artist making dispassionate love to
his or her own wrist. Because sounds like clothing rustle
and footsteps are rarely noticed by the audience, they can
later be subtly adjusted to help characterize the people
who appear to make them. The villain's sword can be
given a more ominous swishing sound than the hero's.

Sound effects that need not be recorded in sync can
come from CD libraries or be freshly generated. Often
recording the original source is not as convincing as
inventing one. The editors of Ben-Hur (1959) found that
recording real whips for the chariot race sounded less
realistic than steaks slapped on a thigh. There is partic-
ular freedom to create sound effects when there is no
authentic source for the image, as in monster and science
fiction films. Creators of sounds often start by recording
something real and then processing (altering) it. Two
simple processing tricks that date from the earliest days
of sound effects are reversing the original sound or
changing its pitch. It is also common practice to create
one new sound by "stacking" effects — layering several
sources and processing them together. For instance, the
voice of the Star Wars (1977) droid, R2-D2, is a combi-
nation of electronically generated sound plus water pipes,
whistles, and human vocalizations. With digital technol-
ogies, a sound editor can feed into a computer a brief
sample of a sound, which can then be expanded and
radically modified.

Music is not usually written until postproduction.
The director, composer, and music editor have had a
spotting session, running through the rough cut of the
film and agreeing on where, and what kind of, music is
needed. Then, the music editor prepares a detailed list of
"cues" that are timed to the split second, sets up the
recording session if there is an orchestra, and makes any
needed adjustments when the score is mixed with other
tracks.

The final combining of tracks is called "rerecording"
on screen credits, but "the mix" or "the dub" by practi-
tioners. (Many sound terms are regional. Practices also
vary by region or project: from one to three rerecording
mixers may preside at the console.) Basically, the mix
combines the dialogue (and narration if there is any), the
effects, and the music. A final mix may combine hun-
dreds of separate tracks. For manageability, groups of
tracks are '"premixed" so that like sounds have been
grouped and adjusted in preliminary relation to each
other. Since dialogue takes precedence, it is mixed first.
Music and effects, when added, must compete with

neither each other nor the dialogue. Sounds from dispa-
rate sources must be adjusted with tools like equalizers
and filters (which manipulate specific frequencies) to
match and flow seamlessly. Since the ratio of direct to
reflected sound indicates along with volume how far we
are from a sound's source, reverberation is an essential
tool for placing a sound in a space. The rerecording
mixer will also distribute sounds to specific outputs,
deciding, for instance, which sounds go to the surround
sound speakers and which shift from one speaker to
another. The rerecording mixer is both a master techni-
cian who fine-tunes the adjustments to volume, duration,
and tone quality begun in the premix and an artist who
makes thousands of aesthetic choices as well. The best
rerecording mixers must not only balance the various
tracks but also subtly layer and orchestrate them, choos-
ing which sounds to emphasize at a given time to create a
texture and pacing that have an emotional effect on the
audience and support the narrative.

Most likely the work of various sound departments
has been overseen by a supervising sound editor.
Optimally (though rarely) sound is conceived — like pro-
duction design — during preproduction, so the film's
sound is not an afterthought but an organic, integral part
of the film's conception. Films that exploit the fullest
expressive potential of sound may have been planned
with a sound designer, a credit originated to suggest the
conceptual importance of Walter Murch's contribution
to Apocalpyse Now. The term is now used to designate
either someone with an overview of the sound, whose
job can overlap that of a supervising sound editor, or
someone who designs a specific type of sound, such as
dinosaur steps.

AESTHETIC DEBATES

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that sound
would be used unobtrusively. When it became obvious
that talkies were the sound wave of the future, film-
makers and theorists alike worried that their art form
would lose its expressive potential. They worried films
would become "canned theater," in the words of the
French director Rene Clair (1898-1981), that the cam-
era's enslavement to the microphone would necessarily
stifle the eloquent camera movement, lighting, and
montage that many considered the unique language of
"pure" cinema.

Dialogue came under the most direct attack. In
Germany, Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904), who valued film
for those formal properties that differentiated the image
from mere naturalistic reproduction, maintained that
dialogue "paralyzed" visual action and reduced the gap
between film and reality. The German theorist Siegfried
Kracauer (1889-1966), whose contrasting aesthetic

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favored the "redemption of physical reality," suggested
that dialogue could be used cinematically by deemphasiz-
ing its meaning and treating voices as pre-linguistic
sound. The Hungarian theorist Bela Balazs (1884—
1949) lamented the way spoken language eliminated
the universality of the silent screen. However, he sug-
gested ways in which sounds could "educate our ear," for
example, by providing the aural equivalents of photo-
graphed close-ups or by exploiting the dramatic value of
silence, which can be "heard" only in the context of
sound.

Much debate has focused on exploring ways in
which sound might be associated with the image. One
of the earliest formulations came from the Soviet film-
makers S. M. Eisenstein (1898-1948), V. I. Pudovkin
(1893-1953), and G. V. Alexandrov (1903-1984), who
issued a joint Statement on Sound in August 1928.
Warning against the development of "talking films,"
which would lead to "highly cultured dramas" and "the
'illusion' of talking people, of audible objects," the state-
ment called for a "contrapuntal" use of sound that
treated it as an element of montage. Pudovkin later came
out in favor of an approach to disparate sound and image
that he labeled "asynchronism," a distinction that paral-
leled that between Eisenstein's "dialectical" and
Pudovkin's "associational" approaches to silent montage.

Just as initial debate about the function of sound
accompanied the coming of talkies, a second surge of
theoretical writing accompanied the "second revolution
of sound" in films of the 1970s and early 1980s, an
extraordinarily creative period for sound in narrative
films. It has been argued that the ideological implications
of Hollywood practice extended also to the techniques of
sound editing and mixing, which traditionally efface
evidence of their construction. Psychoanalytic and femi-
nist critiques have often focused on the gendered voice:
the female voice is characterized either as the voice of the
mother or as a means whereby a female character tries to
express her subjectivity while patriarchal codes of the
image and soundtrack try to "contain" it. Rick Altman
in the United States and Michel Chion in France have
done the most sustained and nuanced analyses of sound
aesthetics, challenging long-held assumptions about the
relations between image and sound. For instance,
Chion's writings on "audio-vision" explore the ways that
sound and image transform each other. And both writers
have extensively investigated audience position with
respect to sound, demonstrating, for example, that aural
and visual point of view do not follow the same conven-
tions. Other scholars, including Alan Williams, have
focused on ways in which even direct recordings are
not mere reproductions but representations mediated
through choices such as microphone placement and
recording equipment.

MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS

While the first few years of synchronized sound generated
many painfully static films that were effectively filmed
stage plays, the challenge and limitations of the new
technology stimulated some directors to use sound in
ways that remain benchmarks of creativity. In Great
Britain, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) experimented
with varieties of subjective sound in Blackmail (1929),
Murder! (1930), and Secret Agent (1936). In Germany,
Fritz Lang (1890-1976) showed in M — Eine Stadt sucht
einen Morder (M, 1931) how sound could be used as a
leitmotif by associating the murderer with whistling.
Many of the early sound filmmakers made a virtue of
technical limitations by adopting an asynchronous
approach. In their highly stylized earliest sound films,
directors like Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947), Rene Clair,
and Lang dared to accompany silently shot images with
sounds other than dialogue. Thus, counter to the sync
talkie craze (films proudly advertised as "100 percent
talking!"), these films experimented with a variety of
sound-image aesthetics. About half of King Vidor's
Hallelujah (1929) was shot silent and on location, with
its African American cast accompanied by spirituals or
naturalistic sounds (such as bird screeches and labored
breathing to evoke realism and menace during a chase
through a swamp). Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987),
whom Hollywood brought from Broadway because he
was supposed to be an expert in dialogue (like George
Cukor [1899-1983], whose earliest title in Hollywood
was "dialogue director"), was consistently innovative
with sound. Mamoulian's Applause (1929) is a compen-
dium of experiments that create the sense of a three-
dimensional space, including the first use of two-channel
recording by microphones set in separate locations, track-
ing shots with synchronized sound (created by wheeling
the massive soundproof booths in which cameras were
placed), and a densely layered sound track. If Mamoulian
creates a spatial continuity in Applause, Russian director
Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) does everything he can to
break the pretence of real space in his documentary
Entuziazm {Enthusiasm, 1930), which demonstrates a
wide assortment of ways to associate sound and image
that are anti-illusionistic.

It was nonfeature films that most creatively explored
the potential of sound in its first decade. Animated
shorts, not so bound to a realist aesthetic, gave rise to
inspired meetings of sound and image. For instance,
Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies find unlikely visual sour-
ces for familiar sounds, such as the skeleton played as a
xylophone in the cartoon The Skeleton Dance (1929).
In the 1930s, producer-director Alberto Calvacanti
(1897-1982) shepherded into being a series of creative
nonfiction films made by Great Britain's GPO
(General Post Office) Film Unit. These experimental

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documentaries often make rhythmical use of sound, as in
Night Mail (1936), a "film-poem" that edits images of a
mail train to natural sounds, to the verse of W. H.
Auden, and to the music of Benjamin Britten (1913—
1976). Avant-garde films have always been a rich arena
for experimentation with unconventional relations
between sound and image. A notable example is the short
film Unsere Afrikareise {Our Trip to Africa, 1966) by
Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka (b. 1934).

One might think that narrative filmmakers would
have used sound more adventurously once the full capa-
bility of sound editing was realized (about 1935).
However, sound was for the most part used unimagina-
tively. Two glorious exceptions were Jean Renoir (1894—
1979) and Orson Welles (1915-1985), two masters of

sound as well as mise-en-scene. Renoir's films in the early
1930s include virtuosic uses of offscreen and naturalistic
sound. The films he photographed in deep focus, such as
La Regie du jeu {The Rules of the Game, 1939), create
aural as well as visual depth. Citizen Kane (1941)
extended Welles's experiments with sound in his earlier
radio dramas, including echoes that complement the
deep focus photography, rapid shifts in tonal quality,
overlapping dialogue (which, as in other newspaper films,
imparts a sense of simultaneous activity and quick pac-
ing), and aural bridges that compress time and suggest
causal connections by linking words or sounds over dif-
ferent years and locations, as well as a brilliant score by
composer Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975). In later
Welles films, such as Touch of Evil (1958), sound is often
spatially mismatched with its apparent source, creating a

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ROBERT ALTMAN

b. Kansas City, Missouri, 20 February 1925

Robert Altman started as a writer and director for the
Calvin Company, where he made over sixty short
industrial films. His first feature, The Delinquents (1957),
soon caught Alfred Hitchcock's attention and Altman
went to direct several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
He continued to work on TV throughout the 1960s,
directing episodes of numerous series. Altman pushed the
boundaries of film sound in the 1970s to create
polyphonic narratives where cause-and-effect logic is often
subordinated to spontaneity and improvisation.

In M*A*S*H (1970) the recurrent use of a diegetic
loudspeaker along with the combination of radio
microphones and live mixing of overlapping dialogues
adds a realism to the film's satire. After failing to deploy
multitrack technology in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971),
Altman, in collaboration with sound designer Jim Webb
and rerecording mixer Richard Portman, successfully
utilized multitrack recording in California Split (1974)
and Nashville (1975), accomplishing two major feats:
complete freedom of the camera and the construction of
complex soundscapes while recording them in real time.
Ultimately, California Split was dubbed into three-track
stereo but released in mono since most American movie
theaters did not have the technology to reproduce it
accurately. In Nashville he pushed the limits of multitrack
recording by adding sixteen tracks for music recording in
addition to the eight tracks devoted to dialogue. His 1978
effort, A Wedding, required an even larger setup: sixteen
radio microphones, two eight tracks, and two entire sound
crews.

If Nashville centers on the American popular music
tradition, in The Long Goodbye (1973) Altman feeds off a
wider range of music registers as a way to anchor his
adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel within the 1970s
sociocultural milieu. The eponymous theme song plays
from a variety of diegetic sources and is performed in a

range of genres, functioning as a primary characterization
and atmospheric tool. In Kansas City (1996), the simple
story line is a mere alibi for a series of jazz performances by
contemporary musicians. Altman's Popeye (1980) stands as
one of the few experiments with the short-lived
"Parasound" system. Ultimately, Parasound was
completely overshadowed by Dolby due to the former's
lack of adaptability to existing 35mm projection
equipment.

From the early 1980s into the twenty-first century,
Altman has continued to use overlapping dialogue in fdms
such as The Player (1992) and Gosford Park (2001),
creating sound "symphonies" that challenge the spectator
to remain active throughout the viewing process. Similar
to deep focus photography, which frees the eye to scan a
multilayered and multifocal frame, his soundscapes let the
listener construct multiple narrative pathways through the
material. In this respect, Altman's sound is polyphonic,
realistic, and in stark opposition with the more
conventional approach to the sound medium that
matches every visual cue with a dubbed sound effect.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long
Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975),
A Wedding (1978), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993),
Kansas City (1996), Gosford Park (2001)

FURTHER READING

Brophy, Philip. 100 Modern Soundtracks. London: British

Film Institute, 2004.
LoBrutto, Vincent. Sound-on-Pilm: Interviews with Creators of

Film Sound. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.
Self, Robert T. Robert Altman s Subliminal Reality.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 2002.
Sterritt, David, ed. Robert Altman: Interviews. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega

sense of dislocation and disorientation that help define a
nightmarish world.

For economic reasons, Italy's neorealists in the 1940s
had no choice but to shoot silently and add sound later, a
tradition that remains today except for some inter-

national productions. Usually, the result is thinner sound
mixes and less adherence to the precise sync than
Hollywood produces. Italian audiences have become accul-
turated to sparse sound tracks and speech that does not
match lips. Moreover, minimalist approaches to sound, if

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Sound

thought out, can be a virtue, as in the brilliantly stylized
sound of Sergio Leone's Cera una volta il West (Once Upon
a Time in the West, 1968), which has aural close-ups as
striking as its extreme visual close-ups. The French director
Jacques Tad (1909-1982), also using only postsynced
sound, makes us hear afresh the sounds of the modern
world. Playtime (1967), like Tati's other films, has almost
no dialogue; instead it foregrounds sound effects, often
focusing on synthetic materials like plastic, glass, and fake
leather in a comedy about modern architecture and interior
design.

At the other extreme from the dubbing tradition are
those directors who prefer to use only production sound.
Jean-Luc Godard's (b. 1930) early films, and those of
Lars von Trier (b. 1956) and his Dogma 95 circle
usually avoided postproduction refinement of the sound
tracks. The Dogma 95 filmmakers required in their 1995
"Vow of Chastity" that "sound must never be produced
apart from the image, or vice versa." Godard's films wage
frontal attacks on the conventions of mainstream sound
(and picture) editing, including the usual hierarchy of

dialogue over effects or music. In a typical Godardian cafe
scene, pinball machines and traffic noise intermittently
dominate conversation. Whereas Godard's Brechtian aes-
thetic is antiillusionistic, however, the Dogma filmmakers
insisted that their approach was in the service of purity and
realism.

In general, cinemas in non-English-speaking cultures
are less concerned with transparency. Directors whose
films consistently reveal the expressive potential of sound
include Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998, Japan), Robert
Bresson (1901-1999, France), Alain Resnais (b. 1922,
France), Leonardo Favio (b. 1938, Argentina), and Andrei
Tarkovsky (1932-1986, Russia).

Perhaps the most distinctive contemporary US
sound stylist has been Robert Altman (b. 1938), who,
with Richard Portman, developed a system to keep every
actor's dialogue on a separate channel so that he could
interweave and overlap simultaneous conversations among
his large ensemble casts in films such as Nashville (1975).
Like Altman's, Francis Ford Coppola's exceptional sound-
tracks cannot be separated from the work of a longtime

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collaborator, in his case Walter Murch (b. 1943), the
doyen of film sound designers. The Godfather films, The
Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) are exem-
plars of organic sound design. Indeed, the most memo-
rable soundtracks in the United States are often the
product of collaborations between sound designers and
directors who are open to sonic experimentation.
Notable collaborators include Gary Rydstrom (b. 1959),
who designed sound for Steven Spielberg's films Jurassic
Park (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Artificial
Intelligence: A.I. (2001); Ben Burtt (b. 1948) and George
Lucas (the Star Wars series); Randy Thorn and Robert
Zemeckis {Cast Away [2000] and The Polar Express
[2004]), Alan Splet (1939-1995) and (early) David
Lynch; and on the East Coast, Skip Lievsay, who has
worked frequently with the Coen brothers, Spike Lee,
Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme.

Films most likely to use sound creatively within the
classical transparent mode are science fiction films or
those with a major psychological component such as
The Silence of the Iambs (1991) and surreal films, such
as those of David Lynch, whose sound is consistently
distinctive without being obtrusive. Lynch is fond of
sound motifs such as the industrial noises (without
any apparent source) that are heard at a very low level
under the villain's scenes in Blue Velvet (1986).
Subjective or dreamlike scenes are allowed great latitude
within Hollywood practice because the distorted sound is
attributed to a character's perception or a phantasmic
environment.

Conventional US soundtracks are characterized by
density. The growing sophistication of multitrack and
digital techniques has had both a stimulating and a sti-
fling effect; although sound departments of the last few
decades have had access to ever more advanced technol-
ogies, this capability does not necessarily mean that the
sound is used more wisely or creatively. Digital technol-
ogies, along with the audience's experiences with popular
music, have tempted many recent filmmakers to over-
whelm the audience with density, loudness, and wall-to-
wall sound effects. In a sense, sound films in the last
quarter century have come full circle from the early talk-
ing period. Rather than 100 percent talkies, some action
films have effectively become 100 percent car crashes and
fuel explosions, the embodiments of the "audible
objects" predicted by Eisenstein and his colleagues. But
even big action pictures such as the Matrix and
Terminator series can have elegant and inventive tracks

when their sound is judiciously created, selected, and
modulated.

SEE ALSO Music; Production Process; RKO Radio
Pictures; Silent Cinema; Technology; Warner Bros.

FURTHER READING

Alton, Stanley R. Audio in Media. 6th ed. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth-Thomson Learning, 2001.

Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005.

. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York and London:

Routledge, 1992.

Arnheim, Rudolf. "A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the
Talking Film." In Film As Art, 199-230. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1957.

Carlsson, Sven E., ed. www.filmsound.org (accessed 30 December
2005).

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and
translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.

Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to
Sound, 1926-1931. New York: Scribners, 1997.

Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori V.

Alexandrov. "Statement on the Sound Film." In Film Form,
by Sergei Eisenstein, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 257—
260. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949.

Fielding, Raymond, comp. A Technological History of Motion
Pictures and Television: An Anthology from the Pages of the
Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Fischer, Lucy. 'Applause: The Visual and Acoustic Landscape."
In Sound and the Cinema, edited by Evan William Cameron,
182-201. Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave, 1980.

Gomery, Douglas. "The Coming of the Talkies: Invention,
Innovation, and Diffusion." In The American Film Industry:
An Historical Anthology, edited by Tino Balio, 193-211.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.

Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema:
Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of
Film Sound. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.

Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and
Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Williams, Alan. "Is Sound Recording Like a Language?" Yale
French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 51-66.

Stephen Handzo
Elisabeth Weis

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SPAIN

Spanish cinema reflects many of the tensions that have
shaped the development of the Spanish nation over the
twentieth century. One pivotal conflict, that between
traditionalism and cultural modernization, is mirrored
in the efforts to define film both as a cultural product
that reflects the values and customs of the community
that produced it, and as a commodity that circulates
beyond the local community to international markets.
This national cinema project is further complicated
by political upheaval and the reformulation of the
Spanish state. The crucible for modern Spain, the civil
war (1936-1939), profoundly shaped the nature of
the long postwar period. With the post-Franco transition
to democracy, the 1978 constitution granted partial
autonomy to seventeen regional communities, or states.
In two of these regions, Catalonia and the Basque coun-
try, film production partially funded by the state sup-
ported the goal of stabilizing regional cultural identity.
Under the aegis of the European Economic Community,
which Spain formally entered in 1986, Spanish cinema
came into an intimate and sustained relation with other
European cinemas. At various moments in its history,
therefore, Spanish cinema has been used to play out the
scenarios of traditionalism and cultural modernization;
localism and internationalism; the nation as a unified
community; and the counterforces of micro- and macro-
regional cultures. The threads of all these tendencies are
found throughout the history of Spanish cinema.

SILENT CINEMA: 1896-1930

The first public screening of a Spanish-made film,
Eduardo Jimeno's compilation of actuality footage,
Salida de misa de doce del Pilar de Zaragoza (People

Coming Out of the Noontime Mass at the Cathedral of
the Virgin of Pilar in Zaragoza), took place in 1896, just
months before the Lumiere brothers' presentation in
Madrid of similar images of local color that included
port scenes from Barcelona, urban vistas in Madrid,
and, of course, bullfights. Early silent cinema tended to
depict a quaint, almost exotic backwardness that would
become a staple of the cinematic imagery of the country
seen by Spanish and international audiences for decades.

Though Spanish silent cinema had almost no inter-
national impact, there did exist a fledging film culture
during this period. Among its notable figures was
Fructuos Gelabert (1874-1955), whose Rina en un cafe
(Cafe Brawl, 1897) is the first Spanish-made fiction film
made in Spain. Along with Gelabert, Segundo de
Chomon (1871-1929) worked independently during
the final years of the nineteenth century and early years
of the twentieth to develop a number of special effects or
trick films. His most inventive creation was El Hotel
electrico {The Electric Hotel, 1908), which depicts a fully
automated hotel in which a man is automatically shaved
and his wife's hair is combed.

In the early 1900s Barcelona was established as the
principal center for film production on the Iberian pen-
insula. This changed in 1915 when Benito Perojo (1894—
1974) and his brother established the first Madrid-based
film production company. The multitalented Perojo
worked as producer, director, scriptwriter, actor, and
even camera operator on his films.

Perhaps the most significant feature of the silent
period in Spanish cinema was its emphasis on local
cultural tastes to shape the emerging international

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Spain

medium. The early preference for folkloric cinema and
adaptations of Spanish works of fiction and theater is
found, for instance, in Ricardo Banos's 1905 film version
of the popular Zorrilla play Don Juan Tenorio. Several of
the figures who were to shape the early sound film in
Spain had already established themselves in the silent era.
Most notable among these was Perojo, who would later
direct and produce films, and Florian Rey (1894-1962)
and Juan de Orduna (1900-1974), both of whom started
their film careers as actors and went on to direct impor-
tant films of the sound era.

Efforts to imitate the epic style of D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation (1915) led to Spanish epic films
such as the Spanish-French coproduction La vida de
Cristobal Colon y su descubrimiento de America (The Life
of Christopher Columbus and his Discovery of America,
1916), but these seldom appealed to audiences outside
Spain. The last such epic of the silent era was Rey's
anachronistic La aldea maldita (Cursed Village, 1929),
which was made as sound films were being exhibited in
Spain.

THE FIRST DECADE OF SOUND: 1929-1939

Although the first sound film produced in Spain was
Francisco Elias's El misterio de la Puerta del Sol (The
Mystery in the Puerta del Sol, 1929), the quality of early
sound technology was poor. Some Spanish filmmakers
worked abroad, principally in France, on their first sound
films. Florian Rey's Melodia del arrabal {Suburban
Melody, 1933) was shot at Paramount's Joinville Studio
outside Paris, where his friend Perojo had already shot
Primavera en otono {Spring in Autumn, 1933). The sad
reality for the Spanish film industry was that by the end
of 1931 Hollywood's foreign-language film productions
already held the monopoly on the sound-film market in
Spain, even attracting Spanish technicians and artists.

Luis Bunuel (1900-1983), the preeminent figure of
Spanish cinema, forged his early career in France. Unlike
the mainstream fare that Perojo and Rey worked on,
however, Bunuel's first two surrealist films, Un chien
andalou {An Andalusian Dog, 1929) and L'Age d'or {The
Golden Age, 1930), were attacks on conventional cine-
matic narratives. Bunuel shot his first film in Spain, the
documentary Las Hurdes {Land Without Bread, 1933),
also known as Tierra sin pan, about the deplorable social
conditions in the province of Salamanca. The film was
banned first by the Republican government and later by
the Francoist regime.

The first Spanish sound studio in Spain was built
in Barcelona. The following year two other sound-
production studios were established in Madrid. Between
1932 and 1936, the eve of the civil war, the local film
industry produced fifty-seven films, with twenty-eight

films completed in 1936 alone. The two studios that
were seen as the Spanish equivalent of the Hollywood
"majors" were Filmofono, established by Ricardo
Urgoiti, the scion of a liberal publishing family, and
Compania Industrial Espanola SA (CIFESA), founded
by Vicente Casanova. Urgoiti contracted the young
Bunuel as his executive producer. Though Filmofono's
output was modest, the combination of Bunuel's presence
and its few serious productions of popular cinematic fare
made it, along with CIFESA, the most serious efforts to
sustain a studio-based Spanish film industry with socially
relevant and commercially popular films.

Continuing silent-film practices, the dominant style
of these films involved the promotion of local culture
through folkloric narratives {espaiioladas) that reveled in
character actors imitating colorful regional speech pat-
terns. The major commercial successes of the pre-civil
war period included films by Florian Rey {La Hermana
San Sulpicio [Sister San Sulpicio, 1934], Nobleza baturra
[Rustic Chivalry, 1935], and Morena clara [Dark and
Bright, 1936]) and Benito Perojo {Rumbo al Cairo
[Bound for Cairo, 1935], Es mi hombre [He's My Man,
1934], and La verbena de la paloma [Fair of the Dove,
1934]). Such films helped support the impression of the
vitality of the pre-civil war sound-film industry. Without
any government subsidies, and rivaled only by radio in
the mass media, motion pictures became part of the
fabric of popular Spanish culture.

In no small measure, the allure of some sound films
derived from the emergence of popular Spanish film
actresses who constituted in their own right a local var-
iation of Hollywood's star system. Notable among these
were Imperio Argentina (1906-2003), the singer who
had appeared in Florian Rey's biggest hits; the comic
actor Miguel Ligero (1890-1968); and the romantic lead
Rosita Diaz Gimenez (1908-1986) and her male coun-
terpart, Manuel Luna (1898-1958).

This robust film culture was abruptly curtailed when
the Spanish army, under the command of exiled General
Francisco Franco, rose up against the Spanish Republican
government on 18 July 1936. The ensuing civil war
continued for nearly three years, ending with the
Francoist victory. The short-term impact of the civil
war was obvious. Aerial bombings of Madrid and the
diversion of materials to the war effort brought the
collapse of commercial film production. Some films
already in production, such as Fernando Delgado's El
genio alegre (The Happy Spirit, 1939) were not com-
pleted until the war's end. Franco sympathizers Benito
Perojo and Florian Rey continued working at the Ufa
(Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) studios in Berlin,
and, for Perojo, later in Cinecitta in Rome. This was
how lavish folkloric films, such as Rey's Carmen, la de

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LUIS BUNUEL

b. Calanda, Spain, 22 February 1900, d. 29 July 1983

The best-known Spanish filmmaker before Pedro
Almodovar, Luis Bunuel had a film career that spanned
fifty years and involved work in three national cinemas,
those of Spain, France, and Mexico. Ironically, of the
thirty-one films he made, only four of them were shot in
his native Spain. Along with persistent attacks on
Christian dogma and church hypocrisy, Bunuel's most
characteristic theme is a contemptuous view of bourgeois
morality and middle-class values. His Mexican period,
beginning in 1946, includes some of his most
internationally acclaimed films: Los Olvidados (The Young
and the Damned, 1950), El (This Strange Passion, 1952),
and Nazarin (1959). Though varying in style and subject
matter, these works parody bourgeois morality and
contain powerful and violent imagery.

His years at the famed Residencia de Estudiantes in
Madrid in the early 1920s brought Bunuel into contact
with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) and the
painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989), with whom he
collaborated on his first two films, forging his identity as a
surrealist. In Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929)
and L'Age d'or (The Golden Age, 1930), his two surrealist
masterpieces made in collaboration with Dali, he
developed a series of violent images that were designed to
shock his audience and played with editing techniques to
disrupt visual continuity. Even while working on the
documentary Tierra sin pan (Land Without Bread, 1933),
his first film shot in Spain, he intensified the shocking
images of people from backward rural communities by
juxtaposing grotesque images with the tranquil strains of a
Brahms symphony. The notoriety of these early films led
some critics to read surrealist touches in his later works,
especially his popular Mexican commercial films, most of
which were largely divorced from surrealism.

His support of the defeated Spanish Republican
government during the civil war (1936-1939) forced
Bunuel into political exile. After twenty-five years spent
forging a commercial career in Mexico, he returned to

Spain in 1960 to film Viridiana (1961). The film,
approved by strict Spanish censors, appeared to be a
parable about Christian charity recounting the efforts of a
young woman to be a good Christian. Viridiana won a
special prize at the Cannes Film Festival but was
immediately denounced by the Vatican as blasphemous.
The Spanish government, which rightly saw that it had
been ridiculed by the clever filmmaker, responded by
banning the film in Spain, and even mention of Bunuel's
name was prohibited in the Spanish press.

After Simon del desierto (Simon of the Desert, 1965),
and with the exception of two films shot in Spain —
Tristana (1970) and Cet Obscur objet du desir (That
Obscure Object of Desire, 1977) — all of Bunuel's later films
would be shot in France. In his mature final period, Belle
de jour (1967), starring Catherine Deneuve, won
international acclaim, and Le Charme discret de la
bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972)
won an Oscar® for best foreign film.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), LAge d'or
(The Golden Age, 1930), Tierra sin pan (Land Without
Bread, 1933), Los Olvidados (The Young and the
Damned, 1950), El (This Strange Passion, 1952),
Viridiana (1961), Belle de jour (1967), Tristana (1970),
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm
of the Bourgeoisie, 1972)

FURTHER READING

Aranda, Jose Francisco. Luis Bunuel: A Critical Biography.

New York: Da Capo, 1985.
Baxter, John. Bunuel. London: Fourth Estate, 1994.
Evans, Peter. The Films of Luis Bunuel: Subjectivity and Desire.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
, ed. Luis Bunuel: New Readings. London: British Film

Institute, 2004.
Mellen, Joan, ed. The World of Luis Bunuel: Essays in

Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Marvin D'Lugo

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Luis Bunuel. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Triana (Carmen, the Girl from Triana, 1938) and
Perojo's Suspiros de Espana {Sighs of Spain, 1939), were
shot even as the war raged.

THE POSTWAR PERIOD: 1939-1951

Censorship was the most overt symptom of the Francoist
state's desire to reshape the Spanish film industry. Other
measures included special production subsidies for films
of "national interest" and a rating system for subsidies
that reflected the government's own evaluation of films.
The Spanish film industry was thus easily coerced into
developing the narratives that advanced the regime's
ideological and cultural goals. The production subsidies
proposed by the new regime created in the industry a
dependency on government financial supports that
would last well beyond the four decades of the Franco
regime.

There were no stated norms for film censorship, so
the censorship boards that operated over the next two
decades delivered their verdicts on scripts and films based
on their own predilections and biases. The effect of the
intimidation built into the censorship and subsidy proc-
esses was to transfer to the producers, screenwriters, and
directors of Spanish films a form of self-censorship.

These were the people who would invent the narrative
formulas and imagery that would promote the regime's
ideology.

A related form of censorship sprang from the direc-
tive that the Castilian language be used for all films
exhibited in Spanish territory. Dubbing quickly became
a way of deleting dialogue that appeared to challenge the
values, icons, or ideology of the regime. The policy
required the dubbing of all non-Spanish films, and it
had an unintended consequence of helping foreign films,
which were then circulating in Spanish-dubbed versions,
to gain a strong commercial foothold in the domestic
market; the local industry has never recovered.

In the immediate postwar period compliant film-
makers produced a series of films that mythified the
Francoist struggle. By far, the most important film of
this genre was Jose Luis Saenz de Heredia's (191 1—1992)
Raza {Race, 1942). The film was actually scripted by
Franco and followed the exploits of a fictional soldier
during the recent military uprising, suggesting parallels to
Franco's personal career.

Among the most popular films of the 1940s were
costume dramas that fell into various subgenres. One
type, pseudoreligious in nature, was based freely on the
lives of historical figures and the fictionalized lives of
saints. The most notable of these films were Manuel
Augusto Garcia Vinola's Ines de Castro (1944), Jose
Lopez Rubio's (1903-1996) Eugenia de Montijo (1944),
Rafael Gil's (1913-1986) Reina santa (Saintly Queen,
1947), and Juan de Orduha's (1900-1974) Mision
blanca (The White Mission, 1946). Another popular
genre was the historical costume epic that afforded audi-
ences an escape from the drab social realities of the
postwar period. Two films of this type were directed by
Juan de Orduna for CIFESA: Locura de amor {Love
Crazy, 1948) and Agustina de Aragbn {Augustina of
Aragon, or The Siege, 1950). Featuring the striking stage
actress Aurora Bautista, these films became instant hits
and, owing to their commercial and critical success, were
deemed high points of Spanish filmmaking.

Even more popular in the 1940s were adaptations of
nineteenth-century Spanish novels, triggered by the sur-
prising success of El escandalo {The Scandal, Jose Luis
Saenz de Heredia, 1943) and El clavo {The Nail, Rafael
Gil, 1944), both adaptations of works by Pedro de
Alarcon (1833-1891). These films and those that quickly
followed shared, in addition to sources in well-known
novels, a strong melodramatic style. The popularity of
Lola Month (Antonio Roman, 1944), Gil's La prodiga
{The Prodigal Woman, 1946), and the historical bio-
graphy El Marques de Salamanca (Edgar Neville, 1948)
proved the vitality of what by the decade's end had been
formalized as costume melodrama.

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Many Spanish studio-produced melodramas of the
1940s resembled low-budget imitations of Hollywood's
costume epics of the same period, at least in terms of the
efforts to develop a lavish studio style buttressed by a
highly developed star system that featured Alfredo Mayo
and Jose Nieto (b. 1942) in both heroic and romantic
roles, and Amparito Rivelles (b. 1925), Ana Mariscal
(1923-1995), and Luchy Soto (1919-1970) as female
romantic leads. CIFESA had become the quasi-official
studio of the government, producing some of the large-
scale productions that made it the Spanish equivalent of
MGM in the United States.

THE 1950s

Because of its political alliances with Nazi Germany and
fascist Italy, after the Axis defeat in 1945 Spain became a
pariah in democratized Europe. The reactionary tenden-
cies in Spanish culture that resulted from this isolation
changed with the US binational treaty of 1951, which
coincided with the reorganization of Franco's cabinet
that established a film office in the Ministry of
Information and Tourism. The office's director, Jose
Maria Garcia Escudero, championed Jose Antonio
Nieves Conde's film Surcos {Furrows, 1951), granting it
a "special interest" subsidy, only to find the voices of old-
guard conservatism condemning the film's "sordid" neo-
realist visual style and social content. Opponents argued
that Juan de Orduna's historical epic of Columbus's
journeys to the New World, Alba de America (American
Dawn, 1951), was a more appropriate reflection of
national values. The scandal eventually led to Garcia
Ecudero's departure from his post. The rest of the decade
was, in fact, a replay of the clash between conservative
and modernizing forces within the government and the
film industry.

The persistence of traditionalist cultural values was
reflected in the popularity of melodramatic, pseudo-
religious films during the early 1950s, best epitomized
by the most widely acclaimed work of this reactionary
genre: Ladislao Vajda's Marcelino, pan y vino (The
Miracle of Marcelino, 1955). The film owes its popularity
as much to the presence of the child actor Pablito Calvo
as to the presumed religiosity of its narrative and theme.
Other child actors who sustained similar box-office
appeal for otherwise negligible films include Marisol
(Pepa Flores) and Joselito.

The Spanish brand of contemporary comedy, which
had endured throughout the previous decade, now
became a vehicle for veiled social criticism of the regime's
policies. The earliest example of this potent genre is the
debut film of Juan Antonio Bardem (1922—2002) and
Luis Garcia Berlanga (b. 1921), Esa pareja feliz {That
Happy Pair, 1953), a light comedy that highlighted the

hard economic times of the early 1950s in the travails of
a newlywed couple. While Bardem went on to specialize
in more political works, such as the tense melodrama
Muerte de un ciclista (Age of Infidelity, 1955), Berlanga's
career evolved through ingenious social comedies.
Bienvenido, Mister Marshall (Welcome, Mister Marshall,
1953), the most beloved Spanish popular film of the past
half-century, is a satirical look at cultural mores and the
ineptitude of the regime; Los Jueves, milagro (Miracles of
Thursday, 1957) satirizes church bureaucracy and false
miracles. Berlanga's subsequent social comedies, Pldcido
(1961) and El verdugo (The Executioner, 1963), take
sharp aim at institutionalized charity and the Spanish
style of execution, respectively. Thus, over the decade,
the narrative and visual style of one of Spain's most
beloved filmmakers moved to progressively more scath-
ing indictments of the spirit and everyday practices of
Francoist culture.

Working with Berlanga's script collaborator, Rafael
Azcona, Italian-born Marco Ferreri (1928-1997) created
two of the blackest social comedies of the period: El pisito
(The Little Apartment, 1959) and El cochecito (The
Wheelchair, 1960). Social criticism in these films was
rooted in the Spanish variation of Italian neorealism, which
often used black humor to portray the long-suffering work-
ing class and the economic hardships to which they had
become conditioned. This tendency achieves its blackest
images in Ferreri's The Wheelchair, in which an old pen-
sioner poisons his family after they prevent him from
buying a motorized wheelchair. Veering away from the
comedic genre, Carlos Saura's (b. 1932) debut feature,
Los golfos (The Delinquents, 1962), arguably the strongest
expression of Spanish neorealism, depicts the plight of
youthful members of the urban underclass whose sense
of frustration in late- 1950s Madrid leads them to petty
robberies. Seemingly disconnected from Ferreri's or
Berlanga's middle-class characters, Saura's protagonists
nonetheless reveal a spiritual kinship to the same defiant
spirit of social criticism that mark the neorealist comedies
of the period.

REAWAKENING AND TRANSITION: 1960-1975

During the final decade and a half of the old regime
(1960-1975), Spanish cinema witnessed the beginnings
of the cultural transition beyond the dictatorship. The
most emblematic event of that changing order was the
scandal surrounding Bunuel's Viridiana. The famed sur-
realist filmmaker returned from exile in 1961 to make
a film that appeared to be a reverential tale about a young
postulant's dedication to Christian charity. Presented
at the Cannes Film Festival of 1961 as the official
Spanish entry, the film won a Palme d'or, only to be
denounced by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore

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Romano as blasphemous. The film was banned in Spain,
and the production company, Bardem's Union Industrial
Cinematografica SA (UNINCI), was dissolved. A decade
later Bunuel returned to Spain to shoot another film
while Franco was still alive. Tristana (1970), often con-
sidered Bunuel's masterpiece, was based on a minor novel
by the nineteenth-century novelist Benito Perez Galdos.
His final "Spanish" film, also his last film, was Cet
Obscur objet du desir { That Obscure Object of Desire,
1977). Though only four films of his total output of
more than thirty were actually shot in his native Spain,
Bunuel remains for many the quintessential Spanish
filmmaker.

In the early 1 960s a group of progressive technocrats
assumed positions of power in key government minis-
tries. Principal among these was Manuel Fraga Iribarne,
who took charge of the reorganized Ministry of
Information and Tourism, which controlled media cen-
sorship. The liberal Fraga orchestrated the return of
Garcia Escudero to the film office, encouraging him to
publish a set of criteria that would guide the censorship
of film scripts and subsequent final copies of films ready
for distribution. This bureaucratization of censorship
enabled filmmakers and their producers for the first time
to challenge censorship cuts and negotiate revisions.

Censorship reform was part of an administrative
initiative to invent a new image of Spain for international
markets, especially tourism. Part of that plan called for a
"New Spanish Cinema," much heralded through official
promotions at international film festivals. The newness of
Spanish cinema was based on a younger generation of
directors, including Carlos Saura, Basilio Martin Patino
(b. 1930), Miguel Picazo (b. 1927), Mario Camus
(b. 1935), and Manuel Summers (b. 1935), most of
whom would, in time, forge their own careers as main-
stream filmmakers. By 1966 the strategies had yielded
impressive results, boosting the annual production of
Spanish films to an all-time high of 174. Some film
historians later dismissed New Spanish Cinema as merely
the Franco regime's window dressing to cover its repres-
sive nature. But New Spanish Cinema did much to
challenge the status quo by expanding the limits of
permissible representation in Spanish films.

Most notable of such works was Saura's La caza {The
Hunt, 1965), which examined the impact of the civil war
on contemporary consciousness. Saura's success with
broaching the negative image of the war while circum-
venting censorship owed, in part, to the dealings of his
astute producer, Elias Querejeta (b. 1930). Querejeta
engaged the censors, convincing them to allow certain
images and dialogue to remain in the shooting script,
and used the film's dialogue to highlight the ways self-
censorship had deformed the characters' outlook.

Another feature of the Saura-Querejeta collaboration
was the unusual effort made to market the film at inter-
national festivals, drawing attention discreetly to the
social realities of contemporary life in Spain. The Hunt
won the Golden Bear award at the 1966 Berlin Film
Festival. Throughout the final years of Franco's dictator-
ship, Querejeta's modest production company was
responsible for the early careers of a number of other
filmmakers, including Victor Erice (b. 1940), Jaime
Chavarri (b. 1943), and Manuel Gutierrez Aragon
(b. 1942).

Another historically significant movement of the
period was the Barcelona School, young Catalan film-
makers who challenged the "look" of Spanish cinema.
Though largely an effort at aesthetic renovation, the
visual style seen in Vicente Aranda's (b. 1926) Brillante
porvenir {Brilliant Future, 1965) and Fata morgana {Left-
Handed Fate, 1965), Dante no es unicamente severo
(Dante Is Not Only Rigorous, Joaquin Jorda, 1967),
Cada vez que... {Each Time That..., Carles Duran,
1968), and Ditirambo (Gonzalo Suarez, 1969) expressed
a striking alternative to the often drab views and linear
narratives of Castilianized Spanish cinema. These young
directors often took inspiration from contemporary art
and advertising. Of the filmmakers of the Barcelona
School, only Jaime Camino (b. 1936) and Aranda
achieved prominent careers in more conventional main-
stream Spanish filmmaking.

One of the dominant themes of oppositional cinema
during the final years of the old regime, repressed and
deformed memories of the past, was powerfully portrayed
in The Hunt. The theme continued in other Saura films
{El jardin de las delicias [The Garden of Delights, 1970],
La prima Angelica [Cousin Angelica, 1974] and Cria
cuervos [Raise Ravens, 1976]), and in Patino's document-
ary Canciones para despues de una guerra (Songs for After
a War, 1971). The most critically acclaimed of these
efforts was Erice's El espiritu de la colmena { The Spirit of
the Beehive, 1973), which in a seemingly apolitical way
recounts the experiences of a girl of seven or eight in the
Castilian provinces in the early post-civil war
period. Through an elliptical style and an intricate visual
narrative structure, the film stands as a unique expression
of the creative power of filmmakers to subvert the
spirit of censorship to present critical visions of life
under the dictatorship. The film won a special prize at
Cannes.

POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC
TRANSITIONS: 1975-1982

The seven years following Franco's death saw the dis-
mantling of the dictatorship and the implementation
of democratic processes, culminating in 1982 with the

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PEDRO ALMODOVAR

b. Calzada de la Calatrava, Spain, 15 September 1949

The most acclaimed contemporary Spanish director,
Pedro Almodovar developed his skills as a filmmaker in
underground shorts he made in the 1970s before turning
to commercial feature-length films with Pepi, Luci, Bom y
otras chicas del monton (Pepi, Luci, Bom, 1980). This
raucous comedy, shot on a shoestring, eventually became a
cult hit. It portrayed characters from Madrid's pop-culture
movement of the late 1970s (Movida) in the flimsiest of
plots. In a similar antibourgeois style, Laberinto de pasiones
(Labyrinth of Passions, 1982) marked the film debuts of
Imanol Arias and Antonio Banderas, both of whom have
gone on to have important film careers.

Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983), Almodovar's third
film, reflects his first serious engagement in melodrama, a
genre that has shaped much of his subsequent film work.
With {Que he hechoyo para merecer esto!! (What Have L Done
to Deserve This?, 1984), a black comedy with a strong social
theme about urban families living on the periphery of
Spain's economic prosperity, Almodovar began to gain
international attention. The film displays the acting range
of its star, Carmen Maura, who had appeared in
Almodovar's films since her lead in Pepi, Luci, Bom. The
actress and director went on to make three more films over
the next three years: Matador (1986), La Ley del deseo (Law
of Desire, 1987), and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de
nervios ( Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
1988). In their plotting and the centrality given to women
and gay characters, all of whom are motivated by liberated
sexual desire, these three films reflect the modernizing
process of post-Franco Spanish culture. With the success of
these films Almodovar, along with his brother Augustin,
established his own production company, El Deseo S.A.

With Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991), Madrid, the
principal setting of his first nine films, began to recede as
Almodovar's films became more dramatic than comedic in
inspiration. Throughout the 1990s Almodovar focused on
strong female protagonists, and his films' stellar
performances by Spanish actresses Marisa Paredes and
Victoria Abril. At times, his transgressive humor has been
controversial, particularly the presumably comic rape scene
in Kika (1993). Almodovar's films of the post-Kika period
have achieved more general acceptance, as indicated by the
Oscars® he won in two consecutive years, for Todo sobre
mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999) for best foreign
film, and Hable con ella (Talk to Her, 2002) for best
screenplay. Both of these films, as well as his subsequent
La mala educacion (Bad Education, 2004) , are complex
narratives built around themes of artistic creativity, gender
transformations, and the characters' affirmations of new
social and sexual identities.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

{Que he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (What Have I Done to
Deserve This?, 1984), Mujeres al borde de un ataque de
nervios {Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
1988), Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999),
La mala educacion (Bad Education, 2004)

FURTHER READING

Allinson, Mark. A Spanish Labyrinth: The Pilms of Pedro

Almodovar. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001.
Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro

Almodovar. London: Verso, 2003.
Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, ed. Pedro Amodovar: Interviews.

Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004.

Marvin D'Lugo

election of the first socialist Spanish government since the
civil war. There were three notable trends in film culture
in this period: cinematic recreations of historical
moments, often but not always related to the civil war
(Pascual Duarte [Ricardo Franco, 1975], Retrato de fam-
ilia [Family Portrait, Antonio Gimenez Rico, 1976], A un
dios desconocido [To an Unknown God, Jaime Chavarri,
1977]); documentaries that similarly framed previously
proscribed themes related to life under the dictatorship

(El desencanto [The Disenchantment, Chavarri, 1976], La
vieja memoria [The Old Memory, Camino, 1978]); and
irreverent comedies that embraced the style of US inde-
pendent films of the 1970s (Tigres de papel [Paper Tigers,
Fernando Colomo, 1977], Pepi, Luci, Bom [Pedro
Almodovar, 1980], Opera prima [First Effort, Fernando
Trueba, 1979]).

The outburst of sexually explicit films on Spanish
movie screens in the early 1980s was as much a testing of

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Spain

Pedro Almodo'var. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

new freedoms as it was an effort to retain a national
audience in the face of the barrage of previously banned
European films that were now being shown in Spain.
Documentaries such as Vestida de azul {Dressed in Blue,
Gimenez Rico, 1984) and fictional films such as Cambio
de sexo (Change of Sex, Aranda, 1977) and El diputado
[The Deputy, Eloy de la Iglesia, 1979) dealt with previ-
ously prohibited themes such as homosexuality, cross-
dressing, and sex-change operations.

The socialist victory of 1982 brought a radical trans-
formation of state policies, with filmmaker Pilar Miro
(1940-1997) assuming the position of director general of
cinema. Miro's aggressive efforts to promote Spanish
cinema abroad resulted in the awarding of the first
Oscar® for a Spanish film, in the best foreign film
category for Volver a empezar (To Begin Again, Jose
Luis Garci, 1981). Unfortunately, Miro's strategy of
generously subsidizing the industry to produce more
and better films (146 features were produced in 1984)
also increased filmmakers' dependency on the state to
sustain production. Significant support also came

through a coproduction arrangement with Spanish state
television (RTVE) for adaptations of literary classics,
which, in turn, brought new international attention to
Spanish cinema through prestigious festival awards.
These included Camus's adaptation of Camilo Jose
Cela's novel, La colmena {The Beehive, 1982), which
won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival; acting
awards for Paco Rabal and Alfredo Landa at the Cannes
festival for their performances in Camus's adaptation of
Miguel Delibes's Los santos inocentes (Holy Innocents,
1984); and Saura's award for best artistic contribution
for Carmen that same year at Cannes.

SPANISH CINEMA SINCE 1983

The direction and look of Spanish cinema of recent
decades has been transformed by the advent of regional
cinemas and the emergence of a new generation of film-
makers who have once again reinvented a new Spain in
their films. These developments occasioned new strat-
egies of coproduction with state television and cofunding
with foreign sources such as the European Community,
gradually leading to a new dynamic in which Spanish
cinema operates both globally and locally.

Though local in inspiration, regional cinema in
Catalonia and the Basque country produced a series of
films that often attracted a strong box office and critical
acclaim throughout the country. Catalan cinema, which
boasted a film production tradition that predated the
civil war, achieved wide recognition through the films
of three directors who developed strong national appeal.
Camino became known for his historical drama Dragon
rapide (1986). Ventura Pons's urban comedies set in
Barcelona (La rossa del bar [The Blond at the Bar,
1986] and El perque de tot plegat [What's It All About,
1995]) proposed a lighter view of contemporary
Barcelona. But by far the most commercially successful
of Catalan filmmakers was Jose Juan Bigas Luna
(b. 1946), whose career began in the 1970s. His interna-
tional hit Jamon, jamon (1992) introduced Penelope
Cruz and Javier Bardem to international audiences, and
both have gone on to important careers.

With no prior industry to build upon, Basque cin-
ema had to invent itself, which it did in the early post-
Franco period with films such as Eloy de la Iglesia's
El pica and El pico 11 (The Shoot and The Shoot II,
1983 and 1984, respectively), which combined themes of
youth and drug culture against the backdrop of regional
politics. Imanol Uribe's trilogy of films about the Basque
terrorist group, ETA, and Montxo Armendariz's ethno-
graphic dramas (Tasio [1984], 27 horas [27 Hours, 1986],
and Las cartas de Alou [Letters From Alou, 1990]) gar-
nered interest both within the Basque region and beyond.
A younger Basque filmmaker more recently heralded at

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home and abroad is Julio Medem (b. 1958). The stun-
ning narrative and visual style of his films is characterized
by eccentric points of view, most notably in his debut
film, Vacas (Cows, 1992), and Los amantes del circulo
polar (The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, 1999).

The impact of these new regional voices has been
great. Yet, without question, the principal new face of
Spanish cinema of the 1980s, 1990s, and beginning of
the twenty-first century has been Pedro Almodovar
(b. 1949), who became a cult figure in the early 1980s
with youth-oriented comedies that reflected the urban
culture of Madrid in the early post-Franco period (Pepi,
Luci, Bom [1980], Laberinto de pasiones [Labyrinth of
Passion, 1982]). With ^Que he hecho yo para merecer esto!!
(What Have L Done To Deserve This?, 1984) he began to
be noted abroad. By the time his seventh feature, Mujeres
al borde de un ataque de nervios ( Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown), was nominated for an Oscar® for
best foreign film in 1988, Almodovar had attained inter-
national celebrity status and his principal actors, Antonio
Banderas and Carmen Maura, were developing their own

international careers. Almodovar's international success
since Women on the Verge, which includes a best foreign
film Oscar® for Todo sobre mi madre (All About My
Mother, 1999), and an Oscar® for best screenplay for
Hable con ella (Talk to Her, 2002), has ushered in a
period in which Spanish cinema has finally achieved its
promise of a cinema rooted both in contemporary
national culture and the styles and themes of interna-
tional film culture.

FURTHER READING

Besas, Peter. Behind the Spanish Lens: Spanish Cinema Under
Fascism and Democracy. Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1985.

Deveny, Thomas. Cain on Screen: Contemporary Spanish Cinema.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

D'Lugo, Marvin. Guide to the Cinema of Spain. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1997.

Evans, Peter William. Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Spain

Hopewell, John. Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco.
London: British Film Institute, 1986.

Jordan, Barry, and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. Contemporary
Spanish Cinema. Manchester, UK and New York: University
of Manchester Press, 1998.

Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National
Cinema in Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

, ed. Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation.

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Marvin D'Lugo

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SPECIAL EFFECTS

Special effects in cinema can be divided into physical and
optical effects (in the industry often referred to as
"effects" and "special effects," respectively), the former
done in front of the camera, the latter after the negative
has been exposed. Unfortunately, this neat distinction
breaks down over some optical effects that are produced
by double exposures of the film strip or rear projection
during shooting, and increasingly in the use of physical
("practical") elements as resources in digital postproduc-
tion. Effects are most commonly associated with creating
images of scenes, events, and characters that do not exist
in the real world or that cannot be photographed, but
they are also used for economic reasons. Cost is both a
stimulus to and a major constraint on the use of special
effects. Closely related to the cost factor are time con-
straints, and increasingly the physical capacity of com-
puter processors. Many effects techniques have been
designed expressly to increase the temporal and comput-
ing efficiency of complex sequences. Despite much recent
press criticism of Hollywood blockbuster films, it is
relatively rare for a film to be promoted exclusively for
its special effects; nevertheless, many films depend on
effects for their appeal.

The crucial qualities sought by most effects profes-
sionals are believability and innovation: the phrases
"special effects" and "cutting edge" are difficult to dis-
associate, providing the profession with its greatest single
challenge. At the same time, while taking pride in their
craft, effects professionals commonly refer to the subor-
dination of special effects to the narrative demands of the
project, and are particularly sensitive to the possibilities
of creating creatures, objects, and locations with distinc-
tive personalities.

PHYSICAL EFFECTS

Physical effects are created by several types of professio-
nals, the most celebrated of whom are stuntpeople. Such
work demands both athleticism and skilled training,
often in specialized areas that include work with cars,
animals, or dangerous environments. These effects also
require the work of specialized riggers and prop makers.
The former provide tools such as wirework rigs for flying
and falling, small ramps to make cars flip over, various
types of safety harnesses and mats onto which stuntpeo-
ple can fall, and other similar devices. Prop makers are
responsible for sugar-glass tableware, breakaway furni-
ture, lightweight or rubber weapons, and similar items.
Also involved in many stunts are specialists in the train-
ing and handling of animals ("wranglers"), pyrotechnics
experts (responsible for fire effects), and set designers.
Though many stunts are performed on location, others
have to be staged on specially built sets, so that the design
of the sets must accommodate the performance of the
stunt while providing for the stuntperson's safety. The set
designer must also create positions for cameras, since
many stunts are "oncers," that is, actions that can be
performed only once, either because a portion of the set
has to be destroyed, or because the action is too risky to
perform over and over. Thus multiple cameras are
needed, each of which must have a good "eyeline" on
the action while remaining hidden from the other cam-
eras. Filming stunts often requires the use of different
camera speeds from the standard twenty-four frames per
second of normal cinematography. During the "Battle on
the Ice" sequence in Alexander Nevsky (1938), for example,
Edouard Tisse, Sergei Eisenstein's cameraman, shot at
speeds reported at fourteen frames per second, giving the

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effect of speeding up the action when replayed, but else-
where overcranked the cameras to slow down smaller
actions, in order to give the impression that the lightweight
swords were in fact heavy battle weapons. Wounds can be
simulated using gelatine sacs of fake blood or pumps, by
firing gelatine caps or blood-soaked swabs at stuntpeople,
or by exploding small charges ("squibs") of blood and meat
painted into or under the performers' clothes (an effect
extensively used in The Wild Bunch, 1969).

An example of a scene that is impossible to shoot
occurs in The Perfect Storm (2000): an unrepeatable
meteorological event, far too dangerous for filming even
if it could be repeated, and mostly occurring in pitch
darkness. To re-create the drama of the crew of one
trawler, director Wolfgang Peterson's crew built a large
tank containing an industrial gimbal on which was
mounted a full-scale replica of the ship. As the boat
was tossed in the tank and crew members directed
high-pressure hoses onto the actors, massive shipping

containers converted into water tanks dumped thousands
of gallons of water onto the set. Shot in Steadicam for
close-ups and against bluescreen (large sheets of a specific
shade of blue which, used as a reference tone, can be
removed from the image and replaced with other footage,
giving the impression that the live action takes place in
remote or imagined settings) for wide shots, the scene
would be darkened in post-production, illuminated by
occasional flashes of artificial lightning. Sometimes the
impossibility of a shot is not physical but political or
financial, and many films either use roughly similar
buildings to emulate famous sites across the world, or
build them in whole or in part as sets.

Likewise, miniature sets fall in the domain of the
effects department. Not only do miniatures require
detailed modeling: they create particular lighting demands.
As every model train enthusiast knows, trees do not
have the same structure as twigs. A specific challenge for
miniatures is water, which acts very differently at smaller

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and larger scales, and is frequently mixed with milk and
other liquids to break up the surface tension and to
provide a better response to light. Miniature passes
including water are often backed up with a pass for which
the water is replaced with a reflective material like mylar
to provide reflections of the surroundings, and two or
more passes are then combined in postproduction to
create the final effect. Miniature fire likewise acts differ-
ently from large fires, and must be tricked: a common
device is to use two light bulbs of a suitable color near
each other, flicking them on and off to produce the play
of firelight. Other sets, such as the Minas Morgul mini-
ature for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King (2003), use fluorescent paints, and have to be shot
not only using standard key and fill lights but ultraviolet
illumination to bring out the unnatural colors. Miniature
passes are frequently shot using smoke to obscure defects
in the model or to allow for the compositing of the
miniature shot with other elements. Smoke too acts
differently at different scales, and specialized fumes are
used for this purpose.

The talismanic use of miniature photography is most
associated with the careers of Willis H. O'Brien (1886—
1962) and Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), especially the
former's The Lost World (1927) and King Kong (1933),
and the latter's Sinbad cycle. These films depend upon
stop-motion cinematography, in which models built on
articulated armatures, usually of light steel rods, are
physically moved fractionally between frames in a mini-
ature set. The result may look jerky to contemporary eyes
but is widely cited as inspirational by a number of modern
effects professionals. Particularly delightful is the con-
stant ruffling of King Kong's fur as he is manhandled.
During the 1970s and 1980s, advances in control systems
made possible the rapid development of both human-
operated puppets (for example, those from Jim Henson's
[1936-1990] Creature Shop, which created the Muppets
and many others), especially larger puppets requiring
servo-motors to amplify the puppeteer's movements,
and pure animatronic, robot-like puppets controlled
remotely. A director who has used the technique widely
is Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), whose Jaws (1975) is still
frightening, and who developed convincing (and water-
proof) dinosaur animatronics for The Lost World: Jurassic
Park (1997). Consistency of lighting, relation to the rest
of the miniature set, and the establishment of believable
spatial relations between elements in the shot are critical
factors in developing effective stop-motion sequences. In
recent miniature cinematography, the key advances have
included the development of methods for moving the
miniature camera, and the evolution of the snorkel lens,
which, as its name suggests, uses reflection to bring the
lens far closer to the miniature. Mobile shots of mini-
atures, such as shots of fighting vessels in Master and

Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir,
2003) were not possible in earlier effects films, where
issues of parallax and the matching of camera moves
between miniature and live-action shoots were far more
difficult.

The problem of matching camera moves was con-
siderably eased with the arrival of motion control. A
computer installed in proximity to the camera records
its motions relative to the tripod, as well as laterally, in
relation to the physical space in which it may be dollied
or tracked. The recording is then used to drive either a
second pass through the same space, or to replicate a shot
initiated in a studio at a remote location, or to govern the
movements of a virtual camera. Problems still arise with
handheld or Steadicam shots and with the use of zoom
lenses, since focal length is crucial for reproducing the
shot. Conforming such difficult elements remains a
highly skilled artisanal task.

Creating artificial space has evolved from the nine-
teenth-century melodramatic stage, where elaborate mov-
ing sets were used to create the illusion of larger vistas
than the theater could hold. Developing from these the-
atrical traditions, Georges Melies (1861-1938) first used
hanging drops behind the action, and cut-out fore-
grounds and sidings to create the illusion of depth in
his Star Pictures productions of the early 1900s. Drops,
however, lacked the light responses that a less "stagey"
taste demanded (although many directors retained a taste
for them, notably Federico Fellini in such later films as E
la nave va [And the Ship Sails On, 1983] and // Casanova
di Fellini [Fellini's Casanova, 1976]). In their stead was
developed the technique of matte painting, traditionally
executed on glass sheets that could be placed in relation
to live action in such a way the glass would appear to the
camera as a natural continuation of the real space. One of
the most celebrated examples of the technique was used
to create Tara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Matte
paintings are still used, often in the form of cycloramas
("eyes"), large semicircular drop curtains painted with
pigments responsive to the lighting and film stock used
for a shot, often composed of tiled photographs of real
locations treated to add features, remove unwanted ele-
ments, or smooth over transitions from tile to tile.
Cruder photocopied eyes are used to provide reflections
of the virtual landscape onto real sets and actors.

In contemporary cinema, mattes are frequently
replaced with blue- or greenscreen eyes against which
the actors perform. Earlier versions of this technology
filmed actors against an intensely lit blue or yellow back-
drop through a beam-splitting prism inside the camera,
which directed one stream of light to a strip that received
only blue or yellow light, while the other received every-
thing but, thus creating a perfect traveling matte. The

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Special Effects

RAY HARRYHAUSEN

b. Los Angeles, California, 29 June 1920

An American model animation and special effects expert,
Ray Harryhausen provided the visual effects for many
science fiction and fantasy films. Harryhausen's work was
characterized by a combination of anatomical authenticity
and creative fantasy, whether he was animating actual
animals (the dinosaurs of One Million Years B.C., 1 966) or
imaginary beasts (the Venusian Ymir of 20 Million Miles
to Earth, 1957).

As a young man Harryhausen was interested in
sculpture and palaeontology, both of which would give his
later animated work its distinctive verisimilitude.
Harryhausen was impressed by Willis O'Brien's stop-
motion animation for the original King Kong (1933),
which inspired him to experiment with a variety of
animation techniques himself. He showed his work, which
he had produced in the family garage, to O'Brien, who
hired Harryhausen as his assistant for Mighty Joe Young
(1949), another ape movie. Harryhausen immediately
established his careful working methods by sending a
motion picture cameraman to a zoo to photograph one of
the gorillas, using the footage to help give the film's
animated ape an impressive array of individualized
gestures.

After working briefly for George Pal's Puppetoon
series, Harryhausen contributed some of the animated
effects for Frank Capra's Why We Fight films of the 1940s.
Independently, Harryhausen produced a series of short
animated fairy tales (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood, 1949,
and Hansel and Gretel, 1951), and in 1953 he provided the
special effects for one of the best dinosaur monster movies,
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the first feature for
which he was in charge of visual effects. The movie
features a giant rhedosaurus, disturbed by atomic testing,

who wreaks havoc on New York City. While working on
Beast, a relatively low-budget movie, Harryhausen began
exploring more resourceful ways of combining animated
models with live backgrounds.

In Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Harryhausen
developed the process he called Dynamization, which
incorporates matte photography, sets built to scale, and
the synchronization of animated and live-action
photography. The film boasts some of Harryhausen's best
work, including the justly famous sword fight between
Jason and his men and seven skeletons, a sequence that
alone took four and a half months to produce.

Harryhausen's work on It Came from Beneath the Sea
(1955), about a giant octopus that attacks San Francisco,
marked the beginning of a fruitful business relationship
with producer Charles H. Schneer, which lasted for
seventeen years and resulted in many films. Though some
of Harryhausen's later work was more hurried and looks
comparatively crude, it is important to keep in mind that
he was working in the pre-digital era.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

King Kong (1933), Mighty Joe Young (1949), The Beast
from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers (1956), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1959), Jason and the
Argonauts (1963)

FURTHER READING

Harryhausen, Ray. Film Fantasy Scrapbook. New York: A. S.
Barnes, London: Tantivy Press, 1972.

Harryhausen, Ray, and Tony Dalton. The Art of Ray
Harryhausen. London: Aurum Press, 2005.

Barry Keith Grant

colors of contemporary eyes are likewise reference colors
that can be simply subtracted from the photographic
plate (the term used to describe an element used in
compositing different versions of a scene into a single
image) and replaced with a digital matte, itself frequently
composed of tiled photographic elements.

This technique is especially effective in cases where
directors would previously have used rear projection to

provide a moving matte effect. Rear projection
demanded rigorous synchronization of the rear projector
with the camera, and produced substantial difficulties in
matching the focal length of the camera recording the
actors with the depth of the scene rear-projected, an
effect visible in a number of Alfred Hitchcock films,
among them the driving scene in Notorious (1946).
Typically, recent films use a combination of older and

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Ray Harryhausen with the Allosaur from One Million
Years B.C. (Don Chaffey, 1966). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

newer effects. The jet-bike chase through the forest in
Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi (1983), for
example, uses a traveling matte, in which an undercranked
Steadicam race through a forest location was matched with
a rotoscoped matte into which the actors, filmed against
bluescreen, could be slotted onto the same strip of film
without recourse to digital editing. Rotoscoping refers to
the traditional animation technique of tracing the oudines
of photographed action, frame by frame, to produce mov-
ing silhouettes, a technique now pardy automated in
digital editing software.

Other physical effects used since the very early days
of cinema include filters, such as day-for-night, which cut
down the ambient daylight to emulate moonlight, and
dry-for-wet, especially useful when actors are required to
produce emotional performances during underwater
sequences. Scale effects such as the forced perspective
used to produce the city square in Sunrise: A Song of
Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927) remain significant,
as in the use of real lizards in Journey to the Center of the
Earth (1959). Fantastic landscapes can be created by
shooting small objects such as pebbles to make them

appear the size of boulders, an effect used extensively in
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), while its obverse
appears in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (1958).

Equally theatrical in origin is the use of makeup,
prosthetics, and wigs, though again with the tendency to
seek credibility rather than emotional effect. However,
much of the more flamboyant use of these techniques —
from Fredric March's transformation scene in Dr. Jekyll
and Mr, Hyde (1931) to Jim Carrey's turn in lemony
Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), by way of
John Carpenter's creature cycle of the 1980s and Tim
Burton's Beetlejuice (1988) — tend to belong to the gui-
gnol tradition of the late nineteenth-century stage, a
lineage that has inspired such masters of horror effects
and makeup as Tom Savini (b. 1946) and Rob Bottin
(b. 1959). Other stage-adapted techniques include the
use of partial mirrors and reflections through glass plates
held at a 45-degree angle to the camera, for such effects as
ghosts or actors being consumed by flames that are
actually several feet away but are reflected from the
surface of the glass.

Other recent techniques deserving mention under
the rubric of physical effects are bullet-time, motion
capture, and digital scanning. Bullet-time, associated
with effects supervisor John Gaeta's (b. 1965) work on
The Matrix (1999), uses an array of still cameras timed
by computer to construct an image of a single action
viewed from multiple viewpoints in quick succession,
giving the effect of freezing the action, while a single
virtual camera travels around it. Motion capture, which
revives techniques developed by the chronophotographer
Ftienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s, studs a performer's
body or face with tiny reflectors. Instead of recording the
visible light, motion capture uses infrared or other wave-
lengths to track the movement of these reflectors through
three-dimensional space. The data so captured can then
be applied to a digital double, or distorted to provide
movements for an imaginary character. Digital scanning
deploys a device rather like a barcode scanner on both
objects and people to produce detailed three-dimensional
geometry and surface maps, which can then be reworked
in digital tools. Scans are used, for example, to scale up or
down from models built by effects departments, render-
ing small sculptures as large edifices and vice versa. The
technology is also used to scan actors emoting onto
digital doubles engaged in impossible stunts rendered in
digital spaces. Such scans were used, for example, to
provide key frames for the animation of Gollum's face
in some sequences of The lord of the Rings (2001-2003),
and to map Ian McKellen's face onto a digitized Gandalf
in the sequence showing his fall from the bridge of
Khazad-Dum in the same film.

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Special Effects

Galium (Andy Serkis) in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003). © NEW LINE/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Like motion control technology, motion capture
("mo-cap") and digital scanning share a relationship with
physical reality which is as close as that of photography.
Photography and cinematography rely on reflected light
in the visible spectrum to construct two-dimensional
images. Mo-cap and scanning take nonvisible light to
construct three-dimensional images. Like the technique
of taking molds from physical surfaces and applying
them to miniatures and set construction, or using life-
masks taken from performers as the basis for prosthetic
makeup, the relationship with the surfaces of the sampled
reality is in many instances more accurate than that
gathered by traditional cinematography.

It is important to note that many effects are available
for low-budget film production, and many make inno-
vative use of them. In AMY! (Laura Mulvey and Peter
Wollen, 1979), what appears to be a full-sized chest of
drawers reveals itself to be doll's house furniture. Double
Indemnity Performed by the Japanese-American Toy
Theatre of London is a 1970s video production enacted
entirely by plastic wind-up toys. Spurts of fake blood are
the hardy standby of many student films. Second-hand

stores have provided props, costumes, and prosthetics for
films as disparate as Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987) and
The Lord of the Rings.

OPTICAL EFFECTS

Many optical effects are produced in camera, among
them itising in and irising out (an effect that telies on
literally manipulating the camera's iris, a technique
already well established when Billy Bitzer (1872-1944)
shot Broken Blossoms for Griffith in 1919 and blanking
out areas of the field of view to emulate binoculars,
telescopes, keyholes, gun sights, and similar shapes.
Double exposure can be achieved in camera as well as
in postproduction, by the simple expedient of rewinding
the film and shooting over it again.

Many more effects relied on the optical ptinter, a
device used to print from the master negative to the
positive for editing. Dissolves from one shot to another
and fades to black, for example, could be achieved by
running two strips of negative through the ptinter simul-
taneously. Passing a matte (in this case a thin sheet
of opaque material) across the interface of the two

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filmstrips, exposing first one area and then the area
previously masked by the matte, produced wipes, whose
variety can be best seen displayed in RKO's Flying Down
to Rio (1933). Different areas of the filmstrip can be
printed with different images, a technique used exten-
sively in the documentary Woodstock (1970). Crucially,
optical printing can be used to match shots from dispa-
rate sources: for example, a landscape with characters
reacting matched with a sky filled with billowing clouds
(produced by spilling specially mixed pigments into a
tank of translucent oil) for the arrival of the aliens in
Independence Day (1996). The optical printer was also a
crucial device in titling, where the lettering was filmed
separately on a rostrum, and then printed over the photo-
graphic plate. Likewise, optical printing provided the
base for such innovations as the mixture of cartoon with
rotoscoped live action in Ub Iwerks's (1901-1971) early
Alice animations, such as Alice the Toreador (1925), Alice
Rattled by Rats (1925), and Alice the Whaler (1927).

Indeed, animation has remained a consistent source
of effects within live action cinema, including such land-
marks of animation as the city of the Krell in Forbidden
Planet (1956) and the painterly effects of Waking Life
(2001). The full integration of animation techniques into
features had to wait, however, for the development of
three-dimensional digital animation. Pioneer attempts
like Disney's Tron (1982) and the genesis effect in Star
Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982) intimated what might
be possible. The financial success of the first Star Wars
(1977) indicated what could be achieved with almost
exclusively analogue effects. By 1988, Industrial Light
and Magic, the effects shop established by George
Lucas to work on Willow (released that year, the film in
which he pioneered the digital morph), would provide
over a thousand shots for Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed
Roger Rabbit? (also released that year) . Certain techniques
have remained fairly constant, notably the use of key
frame animation to establish the most important
moments (frequently the beginning and end) of an ani-
mated gesture. Others were the fruit of laborious
research, such as the problem of soft objects (which
explains the preponderance of billiard balls in early dig-
ital animation) and z-buffering (getting objects to touch
without penetrating each other on the z or depth axis
of the image, as opposed to the x and y axes of two-
dimensional images). Celebrated in early examples such
as the watery pseudopod in James Cameron's (b. 1954)
The Abyss (1989), digital animation swiftly reached for
less self-conscious, more embedded functions in movies,
achieving a notable success in Cameron's Titanic in
1997, where the distinctions between set, model, and
animation were all but invisible to contemporary
audiences.

Early vector animation composed creations out of
algebraic descriptions of curves. The popular NURBS
(Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) uses such vectors to
define sections of the surface of a creature rendered
initially in wire frame view, a lattice of interconnecting
lines. The areas bounded by these lines (polygons) can be
programmed to relate to neighboring polygons, so that if
one stretches, another may contract to make up for the
move. More recently, animators have moved toward
subdivision modeling, in which a crude figure is gradu-
ally refined by adding and subtracting polygons to pro-
vide detail. Industry wisdom has it that "reality begins at
1 million polygons," a mathematical response to the idea
that a typical frame of 35 mm film has approximately
that many grains of silver compounds. Wire frame was
for some years the basic view designers had during pro-
duction, since the frames required relatively little proc-
essing time. Once the movements were approved, the
frames would have surfaces applied to them. These may
be generated digitally, typically by the process of ray-
tracing, which allows for both surface color and texture
and for different lighting conditions. Alternatively, they
may have a "skin" applied, a surface texture derived from
photography, as in the case of the digital Harrier jump-
jet in True Lies (1994). Especially for close-up shots,
animators will frequently add bitmap effects, such as
the paint effects available in Adobe Photoshop, to add
extra detail or to provide digital "dirt." One attraction of
three-dimensional modeling is that once built, a creature
can be reused numerous times. A three-dimensional
model is a dataset, and can be recycled not only in films
but, for example, as a Computer-Aided Design and
Manufacture (CADCAM) file, as was the case with the
Buzz Lightyear character in Toy Story (1995), subse-
quently mass produced as a toy.

Individually handcrafted creatures may be too time-
consuming, expensive, or processor-heavy for larger scale
projects. Disney's The Lion King (1994) used a technique
developed in scientific computing to analyze flocking
behavior in order to animate the wildebeest stampede.
Each wildebeest was given a small list of behaviors that it
applied repeatedly, such as "run in the same direction as
the others" and "always try to get to the inside of the
group." Referred to as recursive (to describe the complex
behavior emerging from the repeated application of a
small rule set), this basic artificial life technology allowed
the wildebeest effectively to animate themselves. Similar
techniques have been used with larger numbers of
"agents" with a broader range of behaviors in Disney's
follow-up The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) for
carnival crowds including a hundred or so different
characters, each with a special attribute such as jugg-
ling, dancing, or carousing. Massive (Multiple Agent
Simulation System in Virtual Environment), developed

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RICHARD TAYLOR

b. Richard Leslie Taylor, Cheshire, England, 8 February 1965

With Oscars® for special makeup effects (2002, 2004),
costume (2003, 2004) and visual effects (2002), the
critical and popular success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy
is to date the high point of Richard Taylor's career.
Perhaps the first films planned from the start for DVD
release, the trilogy privileged the detailed attention to
props, sets, and makeup that characterizes Taylor's work as
the cofounder and artistic director of Weta, the firm that
coordinated the production effects for the trilogy.

Founded as RT Effects in 1987 by Taylor and long-
time partner Tania Rodger, the small model-making and
effects studio was relaunched in partnership with director
Peter Jackson and producer and editor Jamie Selkirk to
service advertising, film, and television. Though closely
associated with Jackson's early horror genre pieces, Taylor
made his first major international impression with effects
for Peter Jackson's splatter epic Braindead (1992) and the
TV series Xena and Hercules, both produced by Sam Raimi
and shot in New Zealand, where the company is based.

Taylor's work is characterized by the extensive use of
physical elements, perhaps most unusually the extensive
use of miniatures, notably Saruman's subterranean factory
and the city of Gondor in Lord of the Rings. Taylor honed
his skills on caricature puppets for a TV satire show, on
the lubricious monsters of Jackson's Meet the Peebles
(1989) and the incompetent ghosts of The Frighteners
(1996). Something of that humor remains in the puppetry
and animatronics featured in Taylor's work ever since, as
the craft developed from the cartoonish work of Jim
Henson's Creature Shop toward the photorealism of
Weta's oliphaunts. For Lord of the Rings the animatronics
were supplemented with digital scans of models, which
could then be composited with three-dimensional
elements, adding a new range of dynamics fusing

sculptural with filmic movement. The hybrid physical-
digital environment of twenty-first-century effects owes a
significant debt to Taylor's innovations.

Art house credits for Once Were Warriors (1994) and
Heavenly Creatures (1994) may have helped secure work
on Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
(2003), to which Taylor contributed stunning model work
on the eighteenth-century sailing ships, and on The Last
Samurai (2003), for which Weta supplied the military
weapons, which had become such a feature of The Lord of
the Rings. The ability to build environments articulating an
entire way of life extends to the meticulously detailed
Edoras and Rivendell miniatures for The Lord of the Rings.

Jackson's King Kong (2005) and Andrew Adamson's
Chronicles ofNarnia (2005), both Weta projects,
demonstrate that the invention continues, marked
respectively by the legacies of Willis O'Brien and Ray
Harryhausen. Now supplemented by Weta Digital, Weta
Workshop's broadband satellite links connect the masters
of the past to the globalized future of effects.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Meet the Peebles (1989), Braindead (1992) , Heavenly Creatures
(1994), The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), Master and
Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), The
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe (2005), King Kong (2005), The Legend ofZorro
(2005)

FURTHER READING

Taylor, Richard. The Lord of the Rings: Creatures. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

-. "Taylor-Made: At Long Last, an OnFilm Interview

with Oscar® -winner Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop.'
OnFilm, December 2002: 15.

Sean Cubitt

for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, extends these principles
significantly. Massive uses motion-capture elements to
provide its agents with vocabularies of up to two hundred
movements. Each agent has collision-detection, and each
emits a signal allowing other agents to identify whether it
is friend or foe. Controls allow animators to increase or
diminish the amount of "aggression" at any moment,

triggering a fight or a riot. Otherwise, the agents are
allowed to direct their own actions, guided by tracking
algorithms that direct them toward a particular goal, such
as a pass through a valley. Agents are animated at one of
three levels, according to their size relative to the camera,
with maximum detailing applied with subdivision mod-
elling only to those closest. Many Massive agents are

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Richard Taylor. © NEW LINE/ COURTESY EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

entirely digital, but many, such as the animated horses
attacking the "oliphaunts" in The Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King, also use photographic elements, while
others, such as many of the "hero" (close-to-camera)
"ores" were given features derived from digital scans of
performers in prosthetic makeup and full costume. To
cut render times for sequences employing up to a hun-
dred thousand agents, the Massive Tenderer begins with
the agents closest to the screen, so that only those visible
behind that agent need to be rendered at all, although the
others are still in some sense visible to the program,
which tracks their movements while they are obscured
from the virtual lens.

Certain aspects of digital postproduction still pose
challenges. The most familiar elements of the world,
including eyes and skin, are considered the most difficult
to render successfully. The most complex and successful
experiments on skin tone include subsurface refraction of
light, using complex three-dimensional models with not
only skin but blood vessels, muscles, and bones. Major
three-dimensional models are articulated on virtual skel-
etons, with virtual muscles, and with algorithms govern-
ing the sliding of skin over muscle and bone. Eyes, so
deeply associated with emotion, must also be given great
depth by the use of layers of animation, each of which

responds differently to virtual light. Such effects must
then be matched with the live-action lighting conditions,
with movement in the lit environment as well as their
angle to the camera, and in relation to anything in the
environment that might be reflected in their eyes. One
solution to the problems posed by lesser challenges like
water and fire is the use of sprites, practical elements,
some filmed on location (like the stormy seas of Master
and Commander: The Far Side of the World) and others
created in studios, applied to three-dimensional geome-
try. In analogue days, such effects might be achieved in
optical printers (a flamethrower shot was passed through
the optical printer fifty times to provide the burning skies
of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 1961). Such sprites
may then "track" other digital or photographic elements
through software that instructs, for example, the sprite of
a boat's wake to follow the boat, as in Troy (2004).

Other aspects are automations or more effective
variants of traditional techniques. Editors have long been
responsible for brushing out unwanted elements in a
shot, either literally painting them out or using garbage
mattes to hide them, replacing the matted area with a
"beauty pass," a clean plate of the location without actors
or equipment. These processes are now done digitally.
The process of grading, during which photographic lab-
oratories print the edited film to changing specifications
in order to match the light and color responses, has also
been overtaken by digital grading, a technology that,
however, allows far more than supporting the use of
filters for day-for-night shooting. Digital grading can be
used to apply a color palette to an entire movie or
sequence, and can be applied differentially to different
areas of the image. This tool is useful not only for
balancing exposures in scenes where one area is brightly
lit and another in shadow, nor simply for highlighting
detail in an actor's face; it is an essential tool for combin-
ing plates from disparate sources, especially when com-
positing may involve as many as fifty plates in a single
frame.

Motion control files are extremely significant at this
juncture, as is information on the types of lens used.
Digital mattes, unlike their physical correlates, need to
provide three-dimensional information if there is any
camera movement, where a move would reveal another
facet of the backdrop. A sky applied to a sequence may
derive from "scenic" location shoots or be painted, but it
must match the lighting on all the other plates — for
example, casting cloud shadows or opening into brilliant
sunshine on cue. The crisp detail of digital animations
may need to have motion blur applied to make it more
credible as the photographed object of a camera lens, and
even such accidental artifacts as lens flares (an effect of
sunlight bouncing inside the refracting elements of an
actual camera lens) are often added digitally to give a

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125

Special Effects

Digital animation in George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope (special edition, 1997). kobal collection/

LUCASFILM/20TH CENTURY FOX. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

greater sense of the presence of a real camera on the
virtual or hybrid set. Pyrotechnic effects may be scaled
to match the scene, in which case the effects of their light
on the immediate environment needs to be considered.
Animatronics, water effects (sometimes shot at speeds
over a hundred frames per second), puppets, digital
effects, miniatures, and live action, many of them shot
in multiple passes under different lights, must be blended
together as seamlessly as possible. Excessive detailing may
need to be toned down to produce a more coherent plane
of vision, while providing for the effects of scale and of
the interaction between layers. When major film projects
may take two to three years to develop from storyboard
(often digital animatic) to release, the problem of infinite
"tweakability" enters, not least since each change to the
master edit requires a change to scoring and sound
effects, whose synchronization with the image must be
perfect to convince an audience of its authenticity. Not
surprisingly, the digital storage for feature films is now
measured in terabytes.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In classical film theory, only Bela Balasz (1884-1949)
pronounced full enthusiasm for fantasy as a potential
route for cinema. Though Sergei Eisenstein (1898-
1948) was a consummate technician, and a great admirer
of Disney, he, like Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer,
was committed to the idea of cinema as a realist vehicle

in the purest sense. However, as Christian Metz once
observed, "to some extent, all cinema is a special effect,"
and even classics of the realist canon, such as Citizen
Kane (1941), have used the full range of physical and
optical effects. More recent critics, following the lead of
sociologist Jean Baudrillard, have complained (or
rejoiced) that with special effects, cinema departs from
the depiction of the world in order to produce a form of
hyperreality whose social purpose is to point toward the
unreality of the world of everyday experience.

Scholars reflecting on special effects, especially in
the period since digital media made their biggest
impact on movie production and postproduction, have
derived much of their inspiration from phenomenology,
following the lead of pioneer analyst Vivian Sobchack.
In her work on science fiction film, Sobchack points
especially to the construction of space — as a dimension
as well as a place beyond the atmosphere — as a critical
achievement. Michelle Pierson provides a detailed
account of what she considers the crucial transition
from the "wonder years" of the 1980s, when films like
Terminator 2 (1991) foregrounded their effects wizar-
dry, to the 1990s, when effects became much more a
tool for the production of familiar verisimilitude.
Norman Klein and Angela Ndalianis emphasize the par-
allels between the postmodern culture of special effects
and the baroque period of the counterreformation, with
its use of spectacle and illusion as a means to win
propaganda wars. Taking a more culturally oriented

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approach, Scott Bukatman stresses the interplay between
such themes as superhuman capabilities and cultural
trends; like Klein and Ndalianis, Bukatman is interested
in the connections between special effects cinema, theme
parks, and such phenomena as Las Vegas casino hotels,
some forms of sports, immersive technologies like virtual
reality, and such related popular cultural forms as
graphic novels and computer games. Urbanist and cul-
tural commentator Paul Virilio includes special effects
among the optical technologies with which he credits
the acceleration of society, to the point of its disappear-
ance. Vilem Flusser's preliminary work on digital pho-
tography, meanwhile, suggests that the apparatus of
visual technologies exists to exhaust all possibilities,
reducing humans to mere functionaries of that process.
Between the annihilation of reality and the affirmation of
the phenomena of human experience, the study of spe-
cial effects, though nascent, is already beginning to alter
our preconceptions of the nature and purpose of film.

SEE ALSO Animation; Camera; Cinematography; Crew;
Makeup; Postmodernism; Production Process;
Technology

FURTHER READING

Brosnan, John. Movie Magic: The Story of Special Effects in the
Cinema. London: Abacus, 1977.

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen
in the 20th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003.

Klein, Norman M. The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special
Effects. New York: New Press, 2004.

Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary
Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIL Press, 2004.

Pierson, Michele. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Pinteau, Pascal. Special Effects: An Oral History, Interviews with
37 Masters Spanning 100 Years. New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2004.

Sobchak, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction
Film. New York: Ungar, 1987.

, ed. Meta-morphing: Visual Transformation and the

Culture of Quick-Change. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000.

Sean Cubitt

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127

SPECTATORSHIP AND AUDIENCES

The film audience remains a central area of interest for
both film studies and film industry professionals alike.
Understanding how and why films connect with certain
film viewers and not others can reveal a great deal about
how film functions both as an art form and as entertain-
ment. However, academic film studies and the film
industry have very different motivations underlying their
interest in the film viewer and therefore engage in differ-
ent types of inquiry into the ways in which that viewer
participates in the process of film going.

A straightforward way to distinguish between these
two models is to think about film studies as interested in
how film language constructs a film spectator, and the
film industry as focused on why a film appeals to audi-
ences. In other words, academic film studies is concerned
with how film produces a larger system of meaning in
which the hypothetical film viewer — referred to as the
spectator — is enveloped. On the other hand, because the
film industry is a moneymaking enterprise, the more it
learns about individual film viewers, their tastes, likes,
and dislikes, the better chance it has of ensuring the
profitability of its investment.

THE FILM INDUSTRY AND AUDIENCES

The film industry is interested in studying the tastes and
opinions of actual audiences through empirical studies,
such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Because the
film industry is a moneymaking enterprise, it remains
successful only by producing films that make a profit
over and above their (increasingly sizable) budget and
marketing costs. The industry needs to bring in as many
viewers as possible and therefore must keep close tabs on

what types of stories will appeal to the greatest number of
viewers at any given moment. The industry cannot afford
to bank on hypothetical concepts of the film viewer but
must seek out real audiences, both through research and
through marketing in order to ensure that financial
investments pay off. However, audiences shift over time
in accordance with cultural tastes and trends.

The composition of film audiences has changed sig-
nificantly over the course of American film history. Film
content has largely mirrored the tastes of its audiences,
which is a direct result of the industry's increasing profi-
ciency in adapting to changing audience preferences.
Film first emerged as a popular medium within the
context of working-class and immigrant audiences who
could afford the ticket prices at nickelodeon theaters.
Despite the disdain of the middle and upper classes,
who still preferred the entertainment of the legitimate
theater, films during this period were attended by 26
million people a week. However, the evolution of film
from short kinescopes to feature films in the mid-19 10s
significantly narrowed economic gaps, with film becom-
ing a form of entertainment that slowly but effectively
brought the working and middle classes together as one
audience, increasing attendance significantly. Once film
gained this wide audience, the newly established studio
system targeted certain segments of the population over
others; these demographic groups tended to be conceived
along lines of age and gender rather than class. By 1922,
40 million film tickets were sold per week. By 1929 this
number had increased to 90 million tickets per week.

However, historical events took their toll on film
attendance. For instance, the economic repercussions of
the Great Depression ate into film industry profits. In

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Spectatorship and Audiences

1931 theater admissions dropped off by 12 percent to 70
million per week, and just one year later to 55 million
per week. Over the course of these two years 4,000
theaters went out of business. And with the onset of
World War II, audience composition changed dramati-
cally: with a significant segment of the male population
off at war, Hollywood films targeted a predominantly
female audience. This contributed to the rise in the
1940s of female film genres such as woman's pictures,
which appealed to the female audience of wives, girl-
friends, daughters, and mothers of men who were
deployed.

When the war ended and the troops returned home,
the film industry was forced to compete with the increas-
ingly prevalent new medium of television. Many middle-
class American families were moving to the suburbs;
along with the newfound emphasis on the domestic
sphere of home and family, the flight away from urban
centers, in which movie theaters were traditionally
located, forced Hollywood to struggle to find its audi-
ence. Hollywood reached its peak in attendance in 1946,
with some 100 million tickets sold per week, but by 1955
this number decreased by more than half to 46 million.
Along with this trend away from the urban theaters was
the rise of a new suburban audience of teenagers who
were passionate about rock 'n' roll. The film industry
recognized this new audience and acknowledged its
spending power, making films such as Rebel Without a
Cause (1955) and The Blackboard Jungle (1955) specifi-
cally for them.

In the 1960s a series of studio flops and vast over-
production drove the industry into a deep recession.
Because of the breakdown of the classical studio system,
Hollywood grew increasingly out of touch with the
changing nature of its audience. As the threat of dereg-
ulation and the growing popularity of television grew
even more powerful, the new teenage audience was not
enough to sustain the film industry in the 1960s. The
success of Easy Rider in 1969 was dramatic evidence of
the changing makeup of the film audience, which was
now younger and at the same time more sophisticated,
showing interest in films that more accurately reflected
their own lives. A survey sponsored by the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 1968 revealed
that 48 percent of the audience for that year were
between sixteen and twenty-four years old. As a result
of the popularity of youth-oriented and more experimen-
tal films in the late 1960s, such as Easy Rider, Bonnie and
Clyde (1967), and The Graduate (1967), the 1970s was
one of Hollywood's most artistically promising but
fiscally inconsistent eras, with more independent,
European-influenced films produced. It was only with
the success of blockbuster films like Jaws (1976), Star
Wars (1977), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which

led to the Indiana Jones franchise, that Hollywood was
lifted out of one of the most financially challenged peri-
ods in its history. As a result of these box-office successes,
since the 1980s the film industry has relied on consistent
formulas and franchises to bring in audiences.

An ongoing debate throughout film history concerns
the degree to which film content can influence its audi-
ences' thoughts and behavior. In response to accusations
of immorality and depravity, primarily owing to its
depictions of sex and violence, Hollywood early on devel-
oped a system of self-regulation to fend off government
pressure and threats of censorship. The result of this self-
regulation was a system of self-censorship known as the
Production Code that influenced film content from 1922
to the mid-1950s. The Production Code technically
remained in effect until 1966 but became increasingly
difficult to enforce in the 1950s. In 1968 the MPAA
established a ratings system that categorized films based
on their age-appropriateness and that remains the current
system of regulating audiences. As in the 1950s, preteen
and teen audiences have proved to be extremely impor-
tant as a target audience with disposable income to spend
on entertainment. The introduction of the PG-13 rating
in 1983 forced the film industry to make films that
appeal to audiences of multiple ages in order to realize
the biggest profit on their investment. R-rated films have
been seen as riskier investments because their restricted
age group eliminates this young audience, one of the
most lucrative segments of the population.

Leaving nothing to chance, the film industry does its
best to ensure a film's popularity and success by incor-
porating the audience into the production process. As a
result of the blockbuster successes of the 1970s during an
otherwise gloomy financial period, studios implemented
pre-production market research to ensure a film's audi-
ence before its production. This was a significant change
from the classical Hollywood model, in which an audi-
ence was found after a film's production. In addition,
once a film has finished principal photography and a
rough cut of the film is edited together, it is screened
for a test audience who provide both quantitative and
qualitative evaluations. Film studios go to great lengths to
ensure that test screening audiences are made up of the
widest possible range of the population so that they are
able to assess what demographics the film appeals to and
why. After the test screening, the studio evaluates the
responses to the film and often will alter it considerably
to eliminate overwhelmingly unpopular parts or to
change the film's emphasis. The studio may even order
reshoots to achieve what production executives think will
be a more appealing movie.

There are many examples of films that were dramat-
ically transformed after test audiences did not respond

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well to a particular aspect of a film. One of the more
well-known and interesting examples is Fatal Attraction
(1987). In the original ending, Alex Forest (Glenn Close)
committed suicide while listening to the opera Madame
Butterfly. But this did not sit well with test audiences:
because Alex was a menacing character whom they saw as
crossing the line into unacceptable behavior, the test
audience wanted to see her punished for her crimes
against Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) and his family.
For a cost of $1.7 million, the studio reshot the ending
according to the test audience's wishes, with Alex being
shot to death (after appearing to have drowned) by Dan's
wife, Beth (Anne Archer). This ending proved box-office
gold for Paramount Studios, as Fatal Attraction went on
to gross over $100 million in four months.

Marketing departments of film studios have found
new and creative ways, often unrelated to a film's content
or quality, to attract audiences. Merchandising inspired
by the film, such as action figures based on a film's
characters or the licensing of film concepts to fast food
chains, increases the public's awareness of a film. In
addition, promotional tie-ins with television shows, radio

stations, and magazines as well as popular-music sound-
tracks (with accompanying music videos featuring scenes
from the film) create a "buzz" around a particular film
that can attract audiences who might otherwise not know
about it. With the rising influence of the Internet and
movie-related Web sites, audiences can learn about the
type of reception a film is getting at test screenings or, in
the case of smaller, independent films, on the festival
circuit before it is even released in theaters.

SPECTATORSHIP AND ACADEMIC FILM STUDIES

When film studies began to establish itself as an academic
discipline in the 1970s, film theorists looked to other
fields, most importantly semiotics and psychoanalysis, for
cues on how to best articulate the ways in which film
functions as a system of language. Both semiotics and
psychoanalysis are based on the understanding that larger
structures or systems govern the ways in which individu-
als engage with the world. These structures are inescap-
able; individuals have no control over their position
within them and are subject to their processes. Film
theorists saw many parallels between the pleasurable

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Spectatorship and Audiences

experience of watching a film in a darkened theater and
psychoanalytic discussions of unconscious states of being.

In accounting for the process of how a spectator
experiences a film, theorists drew on Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacan's theories of early childhood develop-
ment, suggesting that the process of watching a film
recreates a similar dynamic between what Lacan called
the imaginary and symbolic worlds. Because film lan-
guage works so effectively to make the viewer feel as
though he or she were enmeshed in its world, the specta-
tor is able to relive the pleasurable state of being in the
imaginary stage again. Psychoanalytic theories of specta-
torship make several assumptions that raise doubts about
its ability to serve as a suitable model for understanding
film viewing. First, in this model the spectator is always
rendered a passive subject of the film text, subject to its
meaning system. This suggests that film spectators do not
have control over the ways in which they view films and
the meaning they take from them — that, in fact, every
spectator receives the same meaning from a film. Also,
because Lacan's notion of Oedipal development is expe-
rienced only by the male child, psychoanalytic theories of
spectatorship are pertinent only when applied to (hetero-
sexual) male spectators. Furthermore, these theories do
not take into consideration cultural and historical var-
iants, implying that all (male) film viewers will respond
to film language in the same way regardless of their
historical, cultural, and political context.

Although the psychoanalytic model remains impor-
tant within academic film studies and continues to pro-
duce active debates, its assumptions have been challenged
by several theoretical positions that pose alternative ways
of thinking about the film spectator. In her influential
essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975),
Laura Mulvey takes a feminist stance toward the implicit
gender dynamics of psychoanalytic theories of spectator-
ship by further interrogating the male specificity on
which the entire framework rests. Like the development
process, in which only the male child can enter into the
symbolic world where language has meaning, she argues
that film language is dictated by a male-controlled sys-
tem. Film language is both controlled by men and
designed for the benefit of male pleasure, which is inex-
tricably linked with looking, voyeurism, and the objecti-
fication of the female image. Mulvey argues that, because
the language of narrative cinema mimics aspects of the
stage, film only serves to perpetuate a type of male-driven
patriarchal language that facilitates male visual pleasure.
As a result, female spectators have no access to it other
than through the male gaze that consistently objectifies
the female spectator's onscreen counterpart. Therefore
the only pleasure that female spectators derive from it is
masochistic (the pleasure in one's own pain). Mulvey
argues that female spectators will be able to find true

pleasure from films only by inventing a new type of film
language that is not driven by narrative.

Mulvey's article posited a comprehensive paradigm
that was difficult to overcome. Yet the work that followed
succeeded in posing alternatives to her argument or
expanding its framework. One of the main paths of
research in this area focused on the potential for female
film spectators to establish a different type of relationship
with films specifically made to appeal to them — referred
to as women's pictures, weepies, or melodramas. Because
these films feature female characters and focus on female
issues, theorists raised compelling questions as to whether
this more feminine mode has the potential to challenge
male-oriented film language. Following the lead of fem-
inist theorists who debated (to varying degrees) the
assumption that the subject or spectator implied by psy-
choanalysis is male, other film theorists responded to the
psychoanalytic model by contesting its inherent dismissal
of historical and cultural conditions, specifically those of
race and sexual orientation. The emphasis of these alter-
native readings was both to argue for an active spectator-
ship informed by one's cultural and social position and to
suggest the possibility for oppositional or alternative
readings that deviate from the dominant (Caucasian,
heterosexual, male) one set forth by mainstream cinema.

For instance, Manthia Diawara argues that psycho-
analytic theories of spectatorship ignore the impact race
has on a spectator's reading of films, contending that
viewers have the potential to resist dominant readings
and establish oppositional perspectives. He argues that
it is therefore possible for African American spectators to
identify with and resist Hollywood's often limited image
of blacks, which Caucasian spectators do as well. In other
words, a spectator's race does not determine his or her
response to a given film. The feminist film theorists bell
hooks and Jacqueline Bobo augmented this discussion of
race and spectatorship by arguing that even more com-
plex readings arise for African American female spectators
because of their double exclusion on the grounds of
gender and race.

Gay and lesbian theorists have also made significant
contributions to the "rereading" of film spectatorship.
Teresa de Lauretis, Andrea Weiss, and Patricia White,
among others, suggest that lesbian spectatorial desire
challenges the traditional heterosexist paradigm, creating
a dynamic of desire outside of previously theorized
notions of spectatorship. If lesbian spectators are outside
of the traditional heterosexual system of desire, then
they pose a significant threat to previous theories of
spectatorship.

Signifying a departure from psychoanalytic concepts,
an increasingly prevalent discussion within film studies of
spectatorship focuses on the historical development of

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audiences in the early film industry. By unearthing
archival documents such as box-office records, studio
files, and periodicals of this era, film historians have
pieced together accounts not only of how audiences
responded to early films, but also of how changing audi-
ence expectations affected the evolution of the film
industry and film language.

SEE ALSO Censorship; Fans and Fandom; Feminism;
Film History; Psychoanalysis; Reception Theory; Star
System

FURTHER READING

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic

Cinematographic Apparatus." In Film Theory and Criticism,
edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 355-365.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Bobo, Jacqueline. "The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural
Readers." In Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television,
edited by E. Deidre Pribram, 90-109. New York: Verso
Books, 1988.

de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and
Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Diawara, Manthia. "Black Spectatorship: Problems of

Identification and Resistance." In Black American Cinema,
edited by Manthia Diawara, 211-220. New York: Routledge,
1993.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: Women 's Films of the
1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its
Spectator, and the Avant-Garde." In Early Cinema: Space,

Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser with Adam
Barker, 56-62. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American
Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA:
South End Press, 1992.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the
Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In
Visual and Other Pleasures, 14-26. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989.

Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York
University Press, 2005.

. Perverse Spectators. New York: New York University

Press, 2000.

Weiss, Andrea. "A Queer Feeling When I Look at You:

Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s." In
Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Diane
Carson et al., 343-357. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994.

White, Patricia. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and
Lesbian Representability. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994.

Williams, Linda. "Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas
and the Maternal Melodrama." In Issues in Feminist Film
Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 137-162. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990.

Michele Schreiber

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SPORTS FILMS

Since the start of the motion picture industry in the
United States, sports have been a frequent subject for
the movies. Hollywood has produced hundreds of films
about sports for the same reason that synergistic ties have
been established between American movies and other
cultural forms, including theater, literature, fashion, tele-
vision, advertising, and toys. From the documentary-style
"news films" of major prizefights and the World Series
that were an important part of the early film industry
to recent blockbusters such as Space Jam (1996), Jerry
Maguire (1996), The Waterboy (1998), The Rookie
(2002), and Friday Night Lights (2004), collaboration
with sports has helped sell the movies.

Sports are rule-governed contests of physical skill in
which humans compete against one another. In the
sports film such athletic contests play a central role in
defining the main characters. The Hollywood sports film
in particular has two more important conventions: a
Utopian view of the world which assumes that anyone
who works hard, is determined, and plays by the rules
will succeed; and a need for plausibility based on resem-
blance to the actual sports world that qualifies its Utopian
outlook with the complexities of social difference. Put
more simply, in their attempt to portray plausible ath-
letes and sporting events, Hollywood films often include
historical forces that complicate their narratives, which
are otherwise focused on individual characters as causal
agents.

SPORTS FILMS AND HISTORY

Knute Rockne — All American (1942) offers an example of
this combination of Utopian simplicity and historical

complexity. In keeping with the patriotic tone of many
Hollywood films made during World War II, Rockne's
life is shown as representative of the social mobility
possible in America: even a boy from a working-class,
immigrant family can grow up to become a national
sports hero. Yet while Knute Rockne — All American osten-
sibly offers the biography of the Notre Dame football
coach as historical proof of the American dream, it
inadvertently makes reference to the selective nature of
this social mobility.

The film unintentionally shows that such opportu-
nity did not extend to African Americans. Blacks appear
only as minor characters in most sports films prior to the
early 1950s, a marginalization which reflects their exclu-
sion, until just before that time, from the highest levels of
most commercial sports. Despite their brief appearance
in the film, the two black characters in Knute Rockne —
All American qualify its affirmation of the American
Dream. In an early scene, when young Knute plays foot-
ball for the first time in a sandlot game, an African
American boy running the ball for the other team knocks
him flat. The only other appearance of an African
American character comes much later in the film, when
Rockne, now the famous football coach at Notre Dame,
returns to South Bend on the train after a tough loss. A
black porter stops at the door of his compartment and
asks Rockne if he would like his suit brushed off before
they arrive. The presence of the porter ironically recalls
the boy who had run over little Knute in the football
legend's first experience with the game that was to make
him famous. The difference in social position between
Rockne and the porter suggests why the experience of the
African American boy appears nowhere but in the one

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Eight Men Out ( John Sayles, 1988) explores the tension between individualism and teamwork in sport. EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

early scene. The promise of equal opportunity, which
both blacks and whites were called upon to defend in
the war, extended to some parts of American society and
not others.

Despite the attempt in Hollywood sports films to
leave out issues such as racism, sexism, class difference,
homophobia, and even the physical limits on athletic
productivity brought on by injury, illness, or age, the
need to plausibly resemble the real sports world requires
some representation of these influences on individual
performance. Yet, even when sports films must acknowl-
edge impediments to individual achievement, self-
reliance is generally held up as the only way to overcome
such barriers. In this regard the influence of the
Hollywood sports film can be seen on films about ath-
letics made outside the United States such as Chariots of
Fire (1981) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which also
follow this pattern of showing how a strong faith in
individual achievement overcomes larger social forces.

Feature films about sports are especially fond of the
idea that history is made by individuals. Only eleven

feature films about sports history are not biography films
(biopics): The Harlem Globetrotters (1951), The Bingo
Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976),
Miracle on Ice (1981), Hoosiers (1986), Eight Men Out
(1988), A League of Their Own (1992), When We Were
Kings (1996), Soul of the Game (1996), Remember the
Titans (2000), Friday Night Lights, and Glory Road
(2006) — and even these focus primarily on two or three
main characters. Just as biopics promote the concept of
self-reliance, media portrayal of sports in general also
gives the greatest recognition to star performance, regard-
less of any gestures they might make to teamwork, fair
play, and fan communities.

Even when teamwork figures prominently in media
narratives about athletics, it doesn't reduce the value placed
on individual performance. Rather, like the middle-
class nuclear family, the team operates as a social
structure to foster the development of self-reliant indi-
viduals; self-effacing play therefore subordinates itself to
the more recognized actions of the star. Hoosiers offers a
good example of this privileging of star performance.

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Although much of the film is a nostalgic parable involv-
ing a big-city basketball coach who learns the impor-
tance of teamwork and community in a small Indiana
town, that thematic emphasis is subordinated in the
film's climactic scene to the individual heroism of a
game-winning basket by a star player.

As part of their affirmation of the idea of meritoc-
racy, media representation of professional sports contin-
ually remind us of the standard of living which star
players achieve. While reports of seven- and eight-figure
annual salaries create the fan resentment one hears
expressed on sports-talk radio and finds in a film such
as The Replacements (2000), they also reinforce the belief
that opportunity for economic advancement exists in
American society. The blockbuster Jerry Maguire makes
this optimistic interpretation of big contracts its central
theme.

The realism of sports films increases their historical
complexity, but it can also support their endorsement of
self-reliance. This realistic style figures most prominently
in action scenes involving footage of actual contests, or
set in stadia filled with crowds of extras, employing
authentic uniforms and equipment and, often, real ath-
letes. These cinematic contests are frequently narrated by
announcers in the style of television or radio coverage
and shown with a continuity-editing style that makes the
sequence of shots seem motivated by the logic of the
events rather than choices made by the filmmakers. For
sports films this representational style has special reso-
nance because it recalls real events in sports "history":
athletic contests that the audience has witnessed in the
past. Heightened realism in scenes in which the star
competes is especially important in validating a belief
that individual performance in these situations counts
most in the achievement of success.

BOXING FILMS AND CLASS

More Hollywood films have been made about boxing
than any other sport. The most common narrative for the
prizefight film involves the boxer's quick rise from dis-
advantage to the title, followed by a fall from grace
usually due to the seduction of wealth and fame, and
some form of redemption in the third act. The heroic
triumph over long odds implied in such a bare-bones
plot summary explains in part why so many boxing films
have been made, and also probably why some of the
biggest male stars in the movies have played boxers,
including James Cagney, John Garfield, Errol Flynn,
Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Tony
Curtis, Elvis Presley, James Earl Jones, Robert DeNiro,
Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Denzel Washington,
and the biggest box-office boxer of all time, Sylvester
Stallone.

While boxing films frequently emphasize self-
determination, the historical record again intrudes on
many of these stories. Historical contextualization appears
in the form of the economic exploitation of desperate and
inexperienced boxers by those who run prizefighting, and
through the fighters' own handicaps, which are due to
their backgrounds of deprivation. Some boxing films
therefore take the position that the most effective strategy
for a working-class fighter to overcome these barriers
requires the support of family and community.

Hollywood boxing movies can be classified into
three groups. The first, made during the Depression
years, serves as a metaphor for the society at large,
attempting to resolve a contradiction between the values
of rugged individualism and the values of community.
Boxing films of the 1930s such as Winner Take All
(1932), Golden Boy (1939), and They Made Me a
Criminal (1939) celebrate a working-class hero who tries
to beat the odds to escape the urban jungle and the
exploitation of the fight game. In the spirit of the New
Deal, however, these pictures also stress the importance
of group support to help the protagonist succeed.

A second cycle of boxing films includes seven movies
released between 1947 and 1956. Three of these, Body
and Soul (1947), The Set-Up (1949), and The Champion
(1949), use a combination of noir and neorealist styles
to criticize the exploitation of working-class fighters. In
reaction to the political repression of the McCarthy-era
blacklists and the increasingly nonwhite makeup of prize-
fighting, films from the 1950s such as The Ring (1952),
The Joe Louis Story (1953), The Harder They Fall (1956),
and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) shifted their
focus to liberal models of assimilation as the best
response to class and racial disadvantage.

The third cycle, which started in 1976 and is
ongoing, is the most diverse. Rocky (1976) and Raging
Bull (1980) feature protagonists who passionately believe
in their ability to single-handedly overcome social iden-
tities defined by class and gender. Sylvester Stallone's
character in the first film realizes that goal, while
Robert DeNiro's Jake LaMotta character in the latter
movie achieves a kind of Christian transcendence for
finally accepting its impossibility. Several of these third-
cycle films, including Rocky, When We Were Kings, and
Only in America: The Don King Story (1998), represent
Muhammad Ali, either to support his politics of antico-
lonialism and black unity or to discredit his critique of
white privilege in order to support the idea of a self-
reliant individualism. Finally, several of the most recent
boxing films, including The Great White Hype (1996),
The Hurricane (1999), Girlfight (2000), Play Lt to the
Bone (2000), and Undefeated (2003), illustrate that issues

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of class, race, and gender are best understood by recog-
nizing their tensions and interdependence.

SPORTS FILMS AND RACE

With the exception of two 1930s films, Spirit of Youth
(1938) and Keep Punching (1939), which were made for
black audiences, African Americans appeared only as
secondary characters (if at all) in feature-length sports
movies from the coming of sound through the beginning
of the civil rights movement. Until the 1950s most of the
infrequent appearances by black characters were in films
about prizefighting, such as Golden Boy and Body and
Soul, probably because it was the least exclusionary pro-
fessional sport for reasons of race. Similar to the repre-
sentation of women in classic Hollywood films, blacks
functioned in these narratives of white, male self-
definition through athletic competition as either suppor-
tive — but self-negating — helpers, or occasionally (along
with Mexican or Chicano characters) as opponents:
obstacles which the protagonists overcome in order to
realize their heroic identities. A cycle of Hollywood films
in the early 1950s, including The Jackie Robinson Story
(1950), The Harlem Globetrotters (1951), and The Joe
Louis Story (1953), featured black athletes and followed
closely on the opening of previously all-white professio-
nal sports to African Americans just after World War II,
but these were stories of self-reliance and white paternal-
ism that attempted to deemphasize social determinants of
racial identity.

In the 1980s and 1990s the National Basketball
Association (NBA) became an important part of an
increasingly spectacular, globalized, and racialized
American popular culture. Broadcast revenues for the
league rose 1,000 percent between 1986 and 1998 as
the NBA's bursts of action highlighted by dunks and
three-point shots fit smoothly into the fast-paced flow
of spectacle that has come to dominate television and
increasingly the movies. During this period Michael
Jordan replaced Muhammad Ali as the best known
American athlete worldwide. A big part of the NBA's
greater appeal both in the United States and abroad came
from its spectacle of black style, headlined for most of
this period by Jordan; because more than 80 percent of
the players are African American, the league exemplifies
how cultural difference has become a hot commodity.

Several movies about basketball made during the
period of the NBA's ascendancy incorporate the new
difference. Michael Jordan figures in several of these
films, starring in Space Jam (1996), appearing in He
Got Game (1998), and invoked by White Men Can't
Jump (1992), Hoop Dreams (1994), and The Air Up
There (1994). With Jordan leading the way, what sold
the NBA and the basketball movies made during the

1980s and 1990s was what Nelson George calls an
"African American aesthetic." (p. xv). This aesthetic fea-
tures constructions of black masculinity that correspond
roughly to traditional positions about identity in the
African American community. On the one hand there
is Jordan's creative improvisation, grounded in black
cultural tradition, yet also distinctive in the degree of its
crossover appeal and in its use as proof that (some) blacks
have access to the American dream. Almost as widely
commodified, but with a less sanguine view of race in
America, has been its flip side, the hypermasculine men-
ace and intimidation represented in professional basket-
ball by Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal, and others,
their "gangsta" personae overlapping to some degree
with those of certain rap performers. Basketball films that
portray this latter version of black manhood include
White Men Can't Jump, Space Jam, and Above the Rim
(1994).

GENDER

Within the Utopian narrative typical of American sports
films, the heroic individual who overcomes obstacles and
achieves success through determination, self-reliance, and
hard work is most often male. The primary notion of
masculinity in sports films is that this male protagonist
defines and proves himself through free and fair compe-
tition modeled on American society, which promises
rewards to the most deserving individuals. The compet-
itive opportunities offered to male athletes in most sports
films justify patriarchal authority by naturalizing the idea
of men as more assertive and determining, while women
generally appear in the secondary roles of fans and
dependent supporters. Differences in social position are
therefore naturalized as evolutionary rather than depicted
as a result of a lack of competitive opportunities. The
competition involving men that sports movies generally
showcase provides an opportunity to validate assump-
tions of male superiority. These films seldom acknowl-
edge that women have not had as much access to sports.
When gender discrimination comes up, in the few films
about female athletes such as Pat and Mike (1952),
Personal Best (1982), Pumping Iron II (1985), and A
League of Their Own (1992), it is often portrayed not as
a systemic flaw in sports competition or American soci-
ety, but rather as just another ad hoc challenge that the
strong and resourceful individual will overcome.

Because they so often feature male athletes, sports
films provide a useful site for the analysis of dominant
ideas of masculinity, yet they also show how it has been
refigured over time in response to changes in American
society. From the 1880s through the end of the twentieth
century, the effects of industrialization, professionaliza-
tion, deindustrialization, changing forms of media repre-

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sentation, and the increased assertion of women and
nonwhite and gay men have forced dominant masculinity
to define itself in new ways. In an attempt to portray
athletic events in a realistic style, the makers of sports
films have responded to these social changes in their
depictions of masculinity — by demonstrating its strength
through service to others {The Iron Major [1943], The
Rookie), by showing nonwhite men and women who
embody its traits {Space Jam, Girlfighi), even by present-
ing a white masculinity inflected with qualities associated
with nonwhite athletes {White Men Can't Jump, Any
Given Sunday [1999]).

A few sports films show assertive women, some of
whom are athletes, pursuing a feminist desire for control
of their careers and relationships; in Pat and Mike, Bull
Durham (1987), and Tin Cup (1996) those strong
women even verbally deconstruct masculinity. Several
films about female athletes such as Personal Best,
Pumping Iron II, and A League of Their Own present a
disjuncture between scenes in which they demonstrate
their ability to appropriate qualities associated with mas-
culinity (especially physical strength and self-confidence)
to perform in sports, and a narrative that pushes them
toward compromise with conservative ideas of gender.
Two more recent films, Girlfight and Love and Basketball
(2000), take a step further by validating female athletes
who can appropriate the positive traits of masculinity,
without requiring they compromise the benefits that they
realize from involvement in sports.

Despite the increased social equality shown in some
recent films, most sports movies made in the last twenty-
five years have continued to tell the stories of white, male
protagonists, insisting on hard work and determination
as the only ingredients that matter for athletic achieve-
ment. The success of Rocky in 1976 demonstrated a
desire to dismiss the inequalities that the 1960s counter-
culture had identified in American society, and gave new

life to Utopian sports movies such as The Natural (1984),
Hoosiers, Pield of Dreams (1989), Mr. Baseball (1992),
Rudy (1993), Angels in the Outfield (1994), The Air Up
There, and The Replacements. These nostalgic films not
only remember the mythology of white male protago-
nists, but also reassert the old portrayals of nonwhites and
women as either obstacles that define the hero or faithful
supporters of his achievement.

SEE ALSO Class; Gender; Genre; Race and Ethnicity

FURTHER READING

Baker, Aaron. Contesting Identities: Sports in American Films.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Baker, Aaron, and Todd Boyd, eds. Out of Bounds: Sports, Media,
and the Politics of Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997.

Dyer, Richard. "Entertainment and Utopia." In The Cultural
Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 271-283. London:
Blackwell, 1993.

Dyson, Michael Eric. "Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the
Pedagogy of Desire." In Reflecting Black: African-American
Cultural Criticism, by Michael Eric Dyson, 64—75.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and
Personal Best." Wide Angle 8, no. 2 (1985): 45-56.

George, Nelson. Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball.
New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Corn, Elliot, and Warren Goldstein. A Brief History of American
Sports. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Grindon, Leger. "Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in
the Boxing Film Genre." Cinema Journals, no. 4 (1996):
54-69.

Streible, Dan. "A History of the Boxing Film, 1894-1915: Social
Control and Social Reform in the Progressive Era." Film
History 3, no. 3 (1989): 235-257.

Aaron Baker

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SPY FILMS

The spy is the most contradictory hero in cinema.
Although money and sex have motivated many spies in
real life and fiction, the essential motivating force behind
espionage is devotion to a cause, usually a nation, that is
best expressed by concealing it. Because successful spies
place loyalty to their country — or to their faction, their
insurgency, or their political agenda — over all other loy-
alties, including their ties to family and friends, the lives
they lead are lies. They may seem to be ordinary citizens,
even citizens of enemy nations, but the mission that
drives them can succeed only to the extent that it is
hidden from those around them.

The most successful real-life spies may well remain
unknown to this day. But since popular entertainment
has no room for unknown heroes, spy films feature either
unsuccessful spies, characters whose covert attempts to
gather secret information about their cause's enemies are
doomed to failure when they are unmasked, or spies like
James Bond, whose success is somehow compatible with
conventional Hollywood heroism, even fame among his
fictional peers. These two character types represent the
two leading tendencies in spy films.

GLAMOUR AND DISILLUSIONMENT

Spying is nearly as old as recorded history. The biblical
Book of Joshua tells how Joshua, son of Nun, sent two
spies secretly into Canaan in order to ascertain whether
the land was fruitful and readily susceptible to conquest.
Three thousand years later, Cardinal Richelieu estab-
lished an elaborate network of secret agents to protect
both Louis XIII of France and his own personal interests,
an episode fictionalized in numerous novels by Alexandre

Dumas and such film adaptations as The Three
Musketeers (1921, 1948, 1973, 1993, etc.) and The
Man in the Iron Mask (1939, 1998). Forty years after
George Washington, stung by the ease with which the
schoolmaster-turned-spy Nathan Hale had been cap-
tured, recruited Major Benjamin Tallmadge as head of
the so-called Culper Ring to gather information about
British troop movements, James Fenimore Cooper
(1789-1951) used these adventures as the basis for his
novel The Spy (1821, filmed 1914). And the tale of how
Billie Boyd, an undercover agent for the Confederacy
during the Civil War, shot and killed a Union soldier
determined to enter her home by force, inspired a similar
scene featuring Scarlett O'Hara, the indomitable heroine
of Gone with the Wind (1939). It is not until the twen-
tieth century, however, that spies and spying truly came
into their own. Their rise corresponds to the rise of
popular fiction, which provided an indispensable supple-
ment to the variously shabby secret agents who had
figured in such literary masterpieces as Fyodor
Dostoyevsky's The Possessed (1871—1872), Henry James's
The Princess Casamassima (1886), and Joseph Conrad's
The Secret Agent (1907), and the rise of movies, a
medium coeval with the culture of modern espionage.
Graham Greene (b. 1952) applied the term "entertain-
ments" to his own spy fiction from The Confidential
Agent (1939, filmed 1945) to The Third Man (1949,
filmed 1949) to The Quiet American (1955, filmed
2002). These tales, like Erskine Childers's The Riddle of
the Sands (1903, filmed 1979), in which a pair of vaca-
tioning yachtsmen discover a German plot to invade
England, and E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great
Impersonation (1920, filmed 1921, 1935, and 1942), in

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which a German spy takes the place of a British aristocrat
he resembles, set a tone of civilized adventure that dis-
pelled the darker implications of espionage.

The earliest movie spies divide appropriately into
two camps. On one side are tragic figures like the
World War I nurse Edith Cavell, who smuggled more
than two hundred Allied soldiers out of occupied
Belgium before she was executed by the German Army
{Dawn, 1928; Nurse Edith Cavell, 1939); the much better
known Mata Hari, whose tactic of seducing her targets
made her a natural for Greta Garbo {Mata Hari, 1931);
and the wholly fictional Marie Kolverer, aka X27, the
streetwalker-turned-spy played by the equally glamorous
Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored (1931). On the other
side are lighthearted stalwarts like Bulldog Drummond,
the unflappable British gentleman whose run of two
dozen films, mostly second features, began with Bulldog
Drummond (1922) and sturdier, more melodramatic her-
oes like Nayland Smith, the earnest foe of the Yellow
Peril represented by the implacable Dr. Fu Manchu in
a long series of shorts and features (for example, The
Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, 1929). In 1928, Fritz Lang
(1890-1976), who had already used the figure of the
gangster to incarnate Fu Manchu's dream of world dom-
ination in the epic crime film Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
{Dr. Mabuse: the Gambler, 1922), substituted the loom-
ing, larger-than-life figure of the spy to produce the first
great spy film, Spione {The Spy, 1928).

Unlike Lang's megalomaniac villain Haghi, Bulldog
Drummond and his cohorts were defending the vast
colonial British Empire's attempt to bring the blessings
of civilization to the colonies by playing "the great
game," a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling's Kim
(1901, filmed 1950) and later applied to the genteel
aristocratic tradition British Intelligence would foster by
recruiting agents from the ranks of the nation's leading
universities. Since the world of spies is a world in which
everyone is in constant danger of being spied upon, spy
films borrow and foster a sense of global paranoia
increasingly characteristic of the jittery twentieth century.
Faceless, often menacing intelligence agencies prolifer-
ated in every corner of the globe: Great Britain's
Ministries of Information for domestic intelligence
(MI5, founded in 1909) and foreign intelligence (MI6,
founded in 1911), the various Soviet bureaus that even-
tually became known as the KGB and SMERSH (both
1917), and such American agencies as the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI, 1908), the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS, 1942) and its peacetime successor, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, 1947). Spies working
for agencies modeled on them came to encapsulate both
the dreams and fears of viewers afraid that individuals
had lost the power to control the juggernaut of history
and hopeful, or at least wishful, that heroic individuals

could indeed make a difference. Unlike World War I,
which was fueled by a chauvinistic faith in the racial
superiority of the homeland and its easily recognizable
citizens, World War II was marked by widespread
rumors of a "fifth column" of undercover enemy agents
already in place in the homeland in preparation for
demoralizing tactics or armed insurrection. In a world
in which every stranger could be a spy, the counterspy
became the indispensable hero, the only figure who could
unmask the enemy and protect the purity of hearth and
home.

To this period of all-purpose Nazi villains belong
such variously glamorized spies as the little-man hero of
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the quasi-documentary
pitting the FBI against American Nazis; the sportsman
who stalks Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden to see if he can
get a clear shot at him and then spends the rest of Lang's
Man Hunt (1941) hounded by the vengeful German
spies who honeycomb London; and the newlyweds who
spend their European honeymoon tracking down a miss-
ing agent in Above Suspicion (1943). The true Everyman,
however, was Peter Lorre's resolutely unglamorous Dutch
novelist beguiled into sordid international intrigue in The
Mask of Dimitrios (1944), based on a tale by Eric Ambler
(1909-1998), who had emerged together with Greene as
the foremost espionage novelist of the 1930s.

SPYING FOR HITCHCOCK

In the meantime, Ambler and Greene's British contem-
porary Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) had begun direct-
ing the most varied and entertaining series of films ever
made about spies. It is no coincidence that The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935), the
films that made Hitchcock famous throughout England
and around the world respectively, are his first two films
about spies. Both involve innocent characters who are
thrown into a world of international intrigue under
circumstances that prevent their seeking help from the
police. Bob and Jill Lawrence become reluctant counters-
pies in The Man Who Knew Too Much because their
daughter has been kidnapped to ensure their silence
about a secret that turns out to be a plot to assassinate
a foreign diplomat. Richard Hannay joins the cause in
The 39 Steps because the police assume he murdered the
female spy who escaped the foreign agents on her trail by
coming home with him only to be murdered in his flat
by her pursuers. Both films tap into the vein of coloni-
alist adventure pioneered by Kipling, Childers, and
John Buchan (1875-1940), who had invented Richard
Hannay in his 1915 novel, but both also develop their
intrigue through a series of episodes in wildly disparate
tones. The Man Who Knew Too Much begins as domestic
comedy before erupting in murder and kidnapping and

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moving toward a nonconformist chapel where anything
can happen, from hypnosis to a shootout, and the Albert
Hall, where Jill Lawrence will have to choose between
protecting her daughter and stopping the assassination
she sees unfolding before her. Once its plot has been set
in motion, The 39 Steps becomes a nonstop series of
chases through a passenger train, the Scottish heaths, a
luncheon party at a manor house, a parade, a political
rally, and a quiet rural inn before ending in a showdown
at the London Palladium.

The thrillers with which Hitchcock followed these
stylishly witty melodramas were increasingly dark. Secret
Agent (1936), based on two stories from Ashenden
(1928), W. Somerset Maugham's (1874-1965) acrid
fictionalization of his own experiences in World War I
espionage, begins with the macabre funeral of writer Edgar
Brodie, who, far from being dead, is reborn as Richard
Ashenden for a dangerous mission to Switzerland. The
film uses even more abrupt alternations between farcical
romance and somber melodrama than The Man Who
Knew Too Much to tell the story of Brodie's gradual
disillusionment with the nastiness of espionage represented
by his bloodthirsty colleague the General. In Sabotage
(1936), Hitchcock uses Conrad's even darker novel The
Secret Agent (1907) as the basis for a grim examination,
still punctuated with improbable humor, of the very
possibility of agency in a world in which everyone is forced
to act in someone else's interests. Only in The Lady
Vanishes (1938), in which the apparently impossible dis-
appearance of an elderly teacher from a swiftly moving
train unites a pair of bickering lovers in matrimony, did
Hitchcock return to the more lighthearted mode of his
first two spy films.

The most distinctive feature of these early Hitchcock
spy films was to unite the glamour and disillusionment
that had heretofore characterized the two separate
branches of the genre. Hitchcock's spies are such ordi-
nary and even reluctant participants in the intrigues
that envelop them that they do not seem like spies at
all. At the same time, Hannay and Ashenden hold out a
hope — comically realized in Hannay's case, melodramati-
cally thwarted in Ashenden's — that the most ordinary
people, under nightmarish pressures, can become extra-
ordinary heroes. After emigrating to America in 1939,
Hitchcock continued to make spy films that were
remarkable, given the wartime conditions under which
they were made, for giving enemy spies a compelling and
articulate voice. Stephen Fisher, unmasked as a German
spy in Foreign Correspondent (1940), reminds his pro-
peace daughter that he has fought for his country in the
best way he could before he sacrifices his life to save those
of other victims of German antiaircraft fire. Charles
Tobin, the Fifth Columnist villain of Saboteur (1942),
defends his tactics against the "moron millions" in a

private room at a society ball. Willy, the U-boat
commander who has sunk the ocean liner in Lifeboat
(1944), is so much more fit and disciplined than the
Allied survivors of the shipwreck that he becomes their
leader and, in the process, outraged the film's wartime
reviewers. Only in the short films Bon Voyage and
Adventure Malgache (both 1944) do the enemy spies
retreat into conventional villainy.

Hitchcock's most original contribution to the spy
film, however, still lay ahead, in his unsparing analysis
of the connection between spying and voyeurism as
rejections of emotional commitment. Although many
earlier films had used spies as metaphors for the wide-
spread suspicion and alienation spawned by the twentieth
century, Notorious (1946), in which an American agent
sends his lover into the arms of a postwar German
industrialist she ultimately marries and continues to
betray, is the first of a new series of Hitchcock films —
not only spy films like North by Northwest (1959),
Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969), but apolitical
thrillers from Stage Fright (1950) to Rear Window (1954)
to Psycho (1960) — to treat the act of spying as a meta-
phor for other kinds of watching that value duty and
detachment over vulnerability, openness, and intimacy.
Whether or not they involve espionage, spying is a radical
metaphor in all of Hitchcock's later films.

FROM COLD WAR TO NEW WORLD ORDER

Just as the synthesis of glamour and disillusionment in
Hitchcock's British espionage films increasingly tended
toward a critique of the whole project of spying, the two
poles were split for other filmmakers whose view of
spying was formed by the Cold War between the Soviet
Union and the United States. Following a modest Red-
baiting cycle that included / Was a Communist for the FBI
(1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), and Pickup on South
Street (1953), the glamour of spying returned full force
in James Bond, the British superspy created by Ian
Fleming in Casino Royale (1953) and brought to the
screen in Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963),
Goldfinger (1964), and their increasingly souped- up
sequels. The formula Fleming had honed — political para-
noia overcome by personal toughness, personal style,
and a license to kill on behalf of Her Majesty's secret
service — was retooled in the film franchise, the most
financially successful in history, which made Bond con-
siderably more suave and less brutal, though the combi-
nation varied greatly depending on whether Agent 007
was played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger
Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, or Daniel
Craig. A series of self-parodying imitations starring
equally imperishable, but far more forgettable, agents like
Derek Flint {Our Man Flint, 1966; In Like Flint, 1967),

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Spy Films

Sean Connery as James Bond emphasized the glamour of espionage in such films as From Russia with Love (Terrence
Young, 1963). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Matt Helm (The Silencers, 1966, and its sequels), and
television's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968)
helped make the spy the most ubiquitous cultute hero
of the 1960s.

Even as legendary counterintelligence chief James
Jesus Angleton was relentlessly combing the ranks of
the CIA for the double agents he called "moles," The
Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) won John le
Carre (b. 1931) a wide following for his far more jaun-
diced view of espionage, however idealistically motivated,
as an endless series of double- and triple-crosses, often by
one's own service. The 1965 film version was only the
first and bleakest of a series of le Carre adaptations that
included The Little Drummer Girl (1984), The Russia
House (1990), and The Tailor of Panama (2001), as well
as the television miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
(1979) and Smiley s People (1982), which features le
Carre's most enduring creation, resolutely colorless agent

George Smiley, who had made his film debut with his
name changed to Charles Dobbs in The Deadly Affair
(1966). The more insistently 007 and his disciples
asserted their heroic identities, the more Smiley and his
inoffensive colleagues like Harry Palmer ( The Ipcress File,
1965; Funeral in Berlin, 1966; The Billion Dollar Brain,
1967) and television's John Drake (Secret Agent, 1964—
1966) and Number Six ( The Prisoner, 1967) shrank into
the woodwork, convinced that the key to their survival
lay in their ability to pass unnoticed.

Although the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989
took the edge off a genre that had already lost its
urgency, cloak and dagger films survive in as many
contemporary guises as the secret agent's own. James
Bond stand-ins like Harry Tasker (True Lies, 1994),
though settling down to family life, refuse to retire,
and outsized films of adventure, intrigue, or counter-
terrorism emphasizing Bond-like action (Die Hard,

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1988, and its sequels), technology {The Hunt for Red
October, 1990), or special effects {Mission: Impossible,
1996; Mission: Impossible II, 2000; Mission: Impossible
III, 2006) continue to gross millions. The genre's appe-
tite for historical nostalgia, already hinted at in
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), has produced entries as
varied as The Day of the Jackal (1973), Eye of the
Needle (1981), The English Patient (1996), and the
television miniseries Reilly: The Ace of Spies (1983).
Films from The Crying Game (1992) to Ronin (1998)
to The Truman Show (1998) have followed Hitchcock's
lead in linking spying, or being spied on, to fears of a
more general loss of identity, and The Matrix trilogy
(1999-2003) has made counterterrorism a metaphor for
a fashionably radical epistemological skepticism served up
with state-of-the-art digital effects. It remains to be seen
what the legacy of September 11, 2001 will be for this
durable, protean genre.

SEE ALSO Cold War; Crime Films; Genre; Thrillers

FURTHER READING

Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The
Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Methuen, 1987.

Black, Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels
to the Big Screen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Cork, John, and Bruce Scivally. James Bond: The Legacy. New
York: Abrams, 2002.

Langman, Larry, and David Ebner. Encyclopedia of American Spy
Films. New York: Garland, 1990.

Lisanti, Tom, and Louis Paul. Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films
and Television, 1962-1973. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.

Parish, James Robert. The Great Spy Pictures. 2 vols. Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow, 1974-1986.

Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Wark, Wesley K., ed. Spy Fiction, Spy Films, and Real Intelligence.
London: Frank Cass, 1991.

Thomas Leitch

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145

STAR SYSTEM

To speak of stardom as a system is paradoxical. Film
stardom promotes the individuality and uniqueness of
certain film performers, yet the term "system" suggests
regularity, repetition, and similarity. However, the oper-
ations of the star system in cinema rest precisely on this
paradox: film stardom is systematic when cinema indus-
tries put in place the organized means to repeatedly
cultivate, control, and circulate the individuated identi-
ties of performers.

STARS AS IMAGES, LABOR, AND CAPITAL

Stars function in three main ways within the culture and
commerce of popular cinema. First, as performers who
appear in films, stars are part of the aesthetic or symbolic
content of films. Alongside films, movie stars also appear
in other media, like television or radio advertisements,
posters, and magazine interviews. Film stars are therefore
always presented to the public as mediated identities —
what is often referred to as a star's "image." Second, stars
are a part of the labor force involved in making films. In
an industrial model of film production, filmmaking is
organized according to a specialized division of labor,
with performers just one category of labor distinct among
the various technical and crafts roles. However, not all
performers are equal, and the greater artistic and eco-
nomic power enjoyed by stars means they top a hierarch-
ical structure of film actors as a privileged category of
labor. This power is linked to the third way in which
stars function in cinema. Stars are employed not only as a
source of labor for making films but also as a key resource
for use in their promotion. Film producers cast stars to
expand the profile of the film in the cultural marketplace,

making the star a form of investment or capital deployed
in anticipation of future profits.

These three functions — image, labor, and capital —
are linked in film stardom. Star images are formed not
only through repetition of a performer's identity across
films and other media, but also through the differences
represented between those images. In the commerce of
cinema, star images can be deployed in marketing cam-
paigns to attract audiences by promoting an individuated
range of meanings — for example, "a Jack Nicholson
film" — offering the repetition of qualities seen in pre-
vious performances, while also differentiating a film from
the many other star-driven popular titles in the market-
place. Through repetition and difference, star images
therefore produce a marketable form of individuality that
is fundamental to the star's status as capital. As Janet
Staiger has observed in The Classical Hollywood Cinema,
stars can be described as "a monopoly on a personality"
(p. 101).

Ownership and control of that monopoly is organ-
ized through the contracting of star labor. For a single
film, a series of films, or for a period of time, stars sign
contracts with producers agreeing to the terms under
which they will provide their labor. Contracts outline
the terms by which the producer or distributor can profit
from the rights to use the star's name or likeness in other
contexts, such as promotional media or possibly tie-in
products. Contracts also detail agreed terms by which the
star is to be remunerated for his or her labor, either
through a regular salary over a period of time or by
payment of a straight fee for a number of films, possibly
combined with a share in the future profits of a
film. Contracts are therefore central to the operation of

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Star System

stardom as a system for they document in concrete form
the ownership and control of stars as image, labor, and
capital.

FORMATION OF THE FILM STAR SYSTEM
IN AMERICA

When film and cinema technologies first appeared in
Europe and the United States in the mid-1 890s, film
was sold to consumers on the technological effect of
moving images rather than the content of what those
images represented. Consequently, the first entrepreneurs
who aimed to exploit the commercial potential of the
new medium saw its value as an instrument of techno-
logical innovation rather than as a new performance
medium. In this commercial context, film acting
remained an amateur or semiprofessional occupation.
American theater already had an established star system,
but the nascent film industry saw no immediate need to
cultivate and promote stars. Frequently early cinema
would see technicians or amateurs performing in films,
although some professional theater actors did venture
into acting for the camera. Until industrialization, the
volume of film production was insufficient to provide
actors with regular employment and film acting was
regarded merely as a means for supplementing income
from the theater.

In the period from 1907 to 1914, several develop-
ments occurred in American cinema that professionalized
film acting and provided the foundations for the film star
system. To supply the nickelodeon boom during the
years 1907 to 1909, filmmakers increased the volume
of film production, providing the beginnings of a move
toward the large-scale industrialization of cinema, includ-
ing the introduction of a specialized division of labor to
rationalize film production. Before 1907 more documen-
taries and comedies were produced than dramas and
tricks. After 1907, however, comedies and dramas
together began to surpass nonfiction forms, and by the
following year over 90 percent of films made were fic-
tional narratives. These conditions may have provided
the context for the professionalization of film acting,
but the emergence of the star system in American cinema
required further means to distinguish stars as a special
category of film actor. In Picture Personalities (1990), a
history of the early star system in America, Richard
DeCordova argues that the system became possible only
after film companies began actively advertising and pro-
moting the names of their performers. Prior to 1909 the
names of actors were kept anonymous, partly because
producers feared the advertising of names would prompt
actors to demand higher salaries; however, after this date
the names of performers began to appear on film credits
and posters. Besides its historical importance, naming

remains fundamental to the operations of the star system,
for the name individualizes the star's identity as a marker
of repetition and difference, identifying the unique
monopoly of a star's image. Naming therefore contrib-
utes to the commodification of the star's identity as an
image that can be used and sold in public culture.

With naming, producers and moviegoers had the
means to identify links between a series of film roles by
a performer, providing the foundation for the construc-
tion of a performer's onscreen professional identity.
However, DeCordova argues that the film star system
fully came into being only after 1914, when the press in
America began to publish stories and features covering
the offscreen lives of film performers. This coverage
documented the private lives of the performers in ways
that were never truly private, for it always offered a vision
of the star's life designed and offered up for public
attention. Frequently, in the early days of cinema, the
practice was to represent the private lives of stars as the
perfect complement to the type of roles they played
onscreen. However, during the early 1920s a series of
star scandals made the headlines. Most famously, the
comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1887-1933) was
tried but acquitted of raping and killing a young woman.
Scandals disrupted beliefs in the private life of a star as
the simple reflection of his or her onscreen image.

DeCordova's history of the star system tracks the
emergence of different categories of knowledge or dis-
course about film performers. Naming made the per-
former's onscreen image — the product of a succession
of film roles — known, and press coverage made a star's
private life knowable. But as the discussion of scandal
revealed secrets that often contradicted the version of the
star's private life given to the press, a distinction could
then be drawn between the star's "private" offscreen
image (that is, the image of privacy publicly offered to
the press) and the private offscreen image that was
intended to remain private and secret but nevertheless
publicly known. These categories are valuable for map-
ping the realms of knowledge about star performers that
still endure in contemporary film culture.

THE STUDIO SYSTEM AND STARS

The emergence of publicly circulated knowledge about
performers was foundational to the making of film star-
dom. In the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood stardom
reached its most systematic phase. During these decades
the major vertically integrated studios all instituted
arrangements for systematically cultivating and market-
ing star performers. Talent scouts were hired by the
studios to search theaters and clubs for promising new
performers. Once signed to a studio, performers would
receive in-house coaching to develop their skills. Before a

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Star System

CLARK GABLE

b. William Clark Gable, Cadiz, Ohio, 1 February 1901, d. 16 November 1960

Although Clark Gable would obtain the title "the King"
during his years in Hollywood, as a contracted performer
at MGM, the dominance of the studio system would mean
that Gable was always more ruled than ruling. After an
unspectacular stage career, Gable secured a couple of
supporting roles in film, with MGM then signing him to a
two-year contract with six-month options at $350 per
week. That year Gable made eight more films for MGM
and two on loan to Warner Bros, as he became integrated
into the studio system.

As an MGM star, Gable was paired with many of the
studio's other contracted stars: Greta Garbo, Joan
Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Norma Shearer. Repeatedly
cast in romantic starring roles, he was frequently required
to display a savage, sadistic attitude toward women.
Although these roles contributed to making Gable a
marketable star image, they equally limited his
performance repertoire. In 1932 Gable commented to
Photoplay, "I have never been consulted as to what part I
would like to play. I am not paid to think."

Gable's individual career at MGM is indicative of the
more general conditions defining the star system in
Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, and the
contracting of Gable's labor illustrates the legal and
commercial operations of the star system. Shortly after
winning the Best Actor Oscar® for his role in It Happened
One Night (1934), a film he made on loan to Columbia as
punishment for his objecting to being typecast by MGM,
in July 1935 Gable signed a new seven-year contract with
the studio. MGM held exclusive rights to the use of
Gable's name, image, and voice. If Gable were injured or
facially disfigured, the studio could suspend him without

compensation. Gable would be billed as either star or
co-star, with his name appearing on posters and other
advertising in letters larger than that of other performers'
names. He would work for forty weeks a year, making up
to three films in that time.

Gable signed a new seven-year contract in January
1940, raising his salary, and a further contract signed in
November 1946 granted him a percentage share in film
grosses. In 1954, after MGM refused to renew Gable's
contract, he signed for two films with 20th Century Fox.
For the remaining six years of his life, Gable worked in the
new freelance conditions of Hollywood stardom,
appearing in productions for United Artists (e.g., Run
Silent, Run Deep, 1958), Warner Bros, (e.g., Band of
Angels, 1957), and Paramount (e.g., Teacher's Pet, 1958).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Red Dust (1932), It Happened One Night (1934), Manhattan
Melodrama, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), San Francisco
(1936), Saratoga (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939),
Mogambo (1953), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), Teacher's
Pet (1958), The Misfits (1961)

FURTHER READING

Fisher, Joe. "Clark Gable's Balls: Real Men Never Lose Their

Teeth." In You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men.

Edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin, 35-51.

London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993.
Harris, Warren. Clark Gable. London: Aurum Press, 2002.
Spicer, Chrystopher J. Clark Gable: Biography, Filmography,

Bibliography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.
Tornabene, Lynn. long Live the King: A Biography of Clark

Gable. New York: Putnam, 1976.

Paul McDonald

performer appeared in films, he or she might undergo
vocal training along with singing and dancing lessons.
Initially, a new performer would be tried out in several
minor and supporting roles. Those performers who were
regarded as star material would progress to lead roles in
minor features before graduating to star in major pro-
ductions. These arrangements provided the studios with
systemized routes for the training and "apprenticeship"
of performers.

To secure and protect the potential marketable value
of the performer's identity produced through this system,
the major studios signed their most promising performers
to contracts that spanned a term of up to seven years.
Term contracts defined the legal but also the commercial
conditions of the Hollywood star system in the 1930s
and 1940s. A contract defined the terms by which a
studio had the rights to commercially exploit a star's
image or likeness. In signing a term contract with a

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Star System

Clark Gable. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

studio, a performer agreed to provide the studio exclu-
sively with his or her services. If a performer advanced to
the heights of stardom, he or she would be guaranteed
riches and fame unknown in other arenas of the perform-
ing arts. However, the exclusivity of the personal services
contract prevented the performer from seeking work with
any other studio.

Alongside the legal and commercial functions, the
term contract also served as an instrument of control. A
studio could determine what films and roles a star
would be cast in, frequently resulting in typecasting,
against which many stars complained. Term contracts
also served as instruments of discipline. As the emer-
gence of star scandals beginning in the early 1920s
destroyed the careers of some popular performers, the
studios, to protect the marketable images they had so
carefully cultivated and circulated, included morality
clauses in contracts to guard against stars committing
any damaging transgressions in their private lives.

Faced with the controlling terms under which they
worked, many stars entered into disputes with the

studios, usually over restrictive casting or when renego-
tiating their contracts. It was common for studios to
loan out their stars to other studios but in certain cases
this practice could be used as a way of disciplining a
troublesome star by forcibly loaning out the performer
to take an uninviting role for a lesser studio. In the most
heated disputes, stars played what was the only card left
for them — to withdraw their labor and refuse to work.
However, in such situations the star could be sus-
pended, with the period of the suspension then added
on to the overall duration of the contract. The term
contract was therefore both a blessing and a trap: it
guaranteed performers regular employment on privi-
leged terms but also granted the studio absolute control
over their careers.

From the late 1940s the vertically integrated studio
system was gradually dismantled. Hollywood was inter-
nally reorganized following the Paramount Decree of
1948, a Supreme Court antitrust ruling against the stu-
dios; external influences, including the impact of tele-
vision, brought about a decline in the moviegoing
audience. With film production consequently reduced,
contracted stars and other leading talent became a
hugely expensive overhead. From the end of the 1940s
into the 1960s, the studios therefore gradually phased
out the long-term contracting of stars. All performers,
including stars, became part of a large freelance labor
pool for the industry to draw on. Stars were no longer
bound to the studios in the way they had been in the
1930s and 1940s. Freelance stars had greater freedom to
select their roles and negotiate significant increases in
their fees between films. They also obtained greater
creative power through forming their own independent
production companies. Without the term contract, the
studios no longer had the means to control and disci-
pline stars. Arguably, the star system was built on the
very mechanics of that control, and so while Hollywood
cinema has continued to be a popular cinema fronted by
the images of stars, the rigid systemization of the 1930s
and 1940s has been replaced by a looser system based on
the circulation of a few major performers across the
freelance labor pool.

STARDOM IN OTHER NATIONAL CINEMAS

Many popular cinemas have stars, but beyond
Hollywood, few national film industries can claim to
have developed a star system. As early American film
saw considerable interaction between theater and film,
so in Britain, France, and India professional performers
of the dramatic and comedy stages occasionally worked
onscreen; but most early film performers in these coun-
tries remained anonymous. In Britain, stage stars
appeared on film from two sources: the legitimate theater

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Star System

Clark Gable worked freelance on his last film, The Misfits
(John Huston, 1961) with Marilyn Monroe. EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

(for example, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Sir
Herbert Tree) and the music hall (George Robey and
Fred Evans). Similarly, in France at the start of the 1900s
early films featured performers from the legitimate
theater such as Coquelin and Rejane. From 1907 the
Film d'Art company signed stars from the Comedie-
Francaise, including Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923),
Louise Lagrange, and Gabrielle Robinne. Performances
by music hall stars like Maurice Chevalier were also
committed to film.

In India, after an initial period of actualites, com-
edies, and trick films, production of narrative features
began from 1913 on. At this time the theater entrepre-
neur Jamsetji Framji Madan expanded his business inter-
ests into film. He formed Madan Theatres Limited in
1919, and systematically created a synthesis between
theater and film, using stage hits as the material for early
narrative film features while casting his leading stage
actors in the screen adaptations. A contracted Madan
player, the Anglo-Indian actor Patience Cooper, became
the first major star of silent cinema in India, with her
name promoted on posters by Madan. Cooper was rep-
resentative of a group of Eurasian actresses, including
Ruby Myers, who adopted the name Sulochana, and

Renee Smith (b. 1912), who became Seeta Devi, that
formed the initial wave of stars in the colonial Indian
cinema.

Studios in Britain, France, and India placed their
leading performers under contract. In 1905 the French
comedian Max Linder (1883-1925) was signed by Pathe,
where he would make a series of comedy shorts. Because
Linder's performances received popular recognition out-
side France, Ginette Vincendeau has argued that he was
the first international film star. Unlike the long-term
contracts offered by the major studios in Hollywood,
historically it became the familiar pattern in French
cinema for film performers to sign contracts with a
producer or director for only one to three films.
Consequently, the French cinema never instituted a star
system comparable to Hollywood's. The careers of per-
formers were never controlled in the same manner and
producers did not work to cultivate and circulate the
images of stars with the same intensity, for any effort
made by an individual producer to promote a star was
sure to be of greater benefit to whomever the star next
worked for.

Although the Indian industry would produce stars of
its own, until the late 1940s popular cinema in India
continued to be dominated by the films and stars of
Hollywood. From the 1930s to early 1950s, a number
of major studios stood at the forefront of the Indian
industry, each with its own contracted stars: Bombay
Talkies, Imperial Film Company, New Theatres,
Prabhat Film Company, Ranjit Film Company (renamed
Ranjit Movietone), and Sagar (later National Studios).
For example, the silent star Sulochana signed to Imperial,
where she was reportedly paid 2,500 rupees per month in
1933, making her the highest-paid film performer in the
period; Kundan Lai Saigal (1904-1947) became the
leading star of Indian cinema in the 1930s while signed
to New Theatres. Following national independence in
1947, the film industry in India was transformed. As
the Hollywood studio system was breaking up, in the
early 1950s the studio system in India began to dissolve.
A consequence of this change was that performers were
no longer retained on term contracts but instead operated
on a freelance basis, signing to perform in a specific film
or series of films. In a direct challenge to the power of the
studios, independent producers offered large payments to
star names, thereby providing the context in which star
fees would rapidly inflate, accounting for an increasing
proportion of the production budget for a film.

Historically, the British cinema has always struggled
to define and sustain itself against the overwhelming
dominance of Hollywood film. Recognizing the impor-
tance of stars for popular cinema, the British film indus-
try has made several attempts to cultivate its own stars

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Star System

and star system. During the 1930s and 1940s leading
studios retained stars on contract: Gainsborough Studios'
stars included Margaret Lockwood (1916-1990) and
James Mason (1909-1984), and in 1947 Dirk Bogarde
was signed by Rank's Contract Artists Department,
whose talent roster was informally known as "the
Rankery." In an attempt to systemize the creation of star
identities, during the late 1940s and early 1950s young
male and female performers like Joan Collins, Diana
Dors, John Gregson, and Christopher Lee had their
screen personas groomed through the "Rank Charm
School." However, the system never guaranteed work
for the performers who passed through; because Rank
cultivated a strong English middle-class persona for its
performers, their appeal was not only restricted within
the social parameters of British cinema but also overseas.
As the examples of Charles Chaplin, Vivien Leigh, Cary
Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Catherine
Zeta-Jones all illustrate, British-born performers have
historically achieved levels of national or international
fame to rival the Hollywood stars only after transferring
their careers to Hollywood itself.

Although popular cinemas in other national contexts
have created star performers and worked to put in place
mechanisms to systematically promote the identities of
stars, arguably the only cinema to have sustained a long
term star system is Hollywood.

A MULTIPLE MEDIA SYSTEM

Stardom in the cinema has always relied on relationships
with various other forms of popular mass media.
Historically, relationships between film stardom and
other media have operated in two main ways: the flows
of performing talent between other media and film, and
the use of other media as channels to promote film stars.

As already discussed, theater originally fed the film
star system in the earliest decades of cinema. With the
birth of radio broadcasting in the late 1920s, a new
popular medium arose, creating stars of its own, provid-
ing performers such as Bing Crosby (1903-1977) with
the exposure to build a film career that continued into
the 1960s. After the international popularization of tele-
vision from the early 1950s, the small screen provided a
fresh window for film stars whose glory years had passed
to present television drama anthologies. Examples
include Robert Montgomery Presents (ABC, 1950-1957),
Charles Boyer Theater (1953), and The Gloria Swanson
Show (1954). However, for the American cinema, tele-
vision increasingly provided the testing ground previ-
ously served by the in-house training offered by the
studios. Numerous stars initially worked in television
before achieving film stardom. Clint Eastwood
{Rawhide, 1959-1966), John Travolta {Welcome Back,

Kotter, 1975-1978), Robin Williams (Mork and Mindy,
1978), Michael J. Fox {Family Ties, 1982), Will Smith
{Fresh Prince of Bel Air, 1990), Brad Pitt {Glory Days,
1990), Jim Carrey {In Living Color, 1990-1994), and
George Clooney {ER, 1994-1999) are just a few of the
performers to gain film stardom following successes in
television.

The ways in which the images of stars are produced
and circulated also contribute to relationships between
film and other media. Alongside films themselves, stars
make a number of other media appearances. The name,
face, and voice of a star will appear in the press, in
television and radio advertisements, and on posters,
DVD cases, and magazine covers. The Internet has added
to the mixture of media channels circulating star identi-
ties, contributing to the presentation of stars in a variety
of contexts, from film promotions to fan sites and "celeb-
rity nude" sites. Through these channels, film stars make
multiple media appearances, often simultaneously, and
cumulatively these channels create and circulate the
image of the star. A star's image today is therefore multi-
ply mediated. Film stardom works across diverse sources
of media output to make a star's image a sign of sim-
ilarity and difference. Of course, organizing the multiple
appearances of a star's image across different media
requires planning. A star's multiple media appearances
are therefore among the clearest indicators that film star-
dom is never the product of the individual performer
alone but always of an array of collaborative and institu-
tional actions systematically designed to make performers
known to the moviegoing public.

SEE ALSO Fans and Fandom; Film History; Journals and
Magazines; Publicity and Promotion; Stars; Studio
System

FURTHER READING

Austin, Thomas, and Martin Barker, eds. Contemporary
Hollywood Stardom. London: Arnold, 2003.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.

Burrows, Jon. Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British
Films, 1908-1918. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press,
2003.

Clark, Danae. Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of
Actors' Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995.

DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the
Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1990.

Dyer, Richard. Stars. Revised edition. London: British Film
Institute, 1998.

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Gaines, Jane. Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the
Law. London: British Film Institute, 1992.

Garga, B. D. So Many Cinemas: The Motion Picture in India.
Mumbai, India: Eminence Designs, 1996.

Gledhill, Christine, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London and
New York: Routledge, 1991.

Macnab, Geoffrey. Searching for Stars. London: Cassell,
2000.

McDonald, Paul. The Star System: Hollywood's Production of
Popular Identities. London: Wallflower Press, 2000.

Vincendeau, Ginette. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema.
London and New York: Continuum, 2000.

Walker, Alexander. Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974.

Paul McDonald

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STARS

Film stardom is a phenomenon formed between the
industry that produces films, the actual content of films,
and the ways in which moviegoers form their relation-
ships with films. To a large extent, the popularity
of cinema results from the production, distribution,
presentation, and consumption of film stars. Looking at
stars therefore provides a focus from which to reflect
more generally upon the workings and attractions of
cinema.

FILM STARDOM AS A CULTURAL INSTITUTION

In his 1 990 history of the formation of the star system in
American cinema, Richard DeCordova argues that after
an initial period when the names of film performers were
not publicly circulated and films actors remained anon-
ymous to the moviegoing public, the first move towards a
star system came with the earliest advertising of perform-
ers' names from 1909 onward. Ever since, film stardom
has worked through the circulation of performer names
and it is through the distribution of those names that the
identities of film stars enter the broader public culture.

Star names appear in film credits, trailers, posters,
interviews, talk shows and fanzines as a familiar and
taken-for-granted feature of popular film culture. Why
are star names so important to popular cinema? What is
the function of star names and what do those names do
to films? While a moviegoer may have seen many films,
sufficient differences exist between single films as unique
cultural artifacts. Moviegoers can therefore never be
entirely certain what they will get at the first viewing of
a new film. Audiences pay for their tickets at the box
office or rent DVDs with an incomplete knowledge of

what they are buying. As film production and distribu-
tion requires high levels of investment, the film industry
bases its business on trying to sell expensively produced
products to audiences who have very little idea of what
they will get. Like systems of genre classification, stars
names are one of the mechanisms used by the film
industry to predetermine audience expectations.

A star's name places a film in relation to a string of
other films featuring the same performer, working as a
marker of continuity. "Tom Cruise" situates Collateral
(2004) in relation to Top Gun (1986), Mission: Impossible
(1996) or The Last Samurai (2003). Although one Tom
Cruise film will never be exactly like the last, nevertheless
the name of the star serves to cultivate a range of expect-
ations and to guarantee the delivery of similar performer
qualities. At the same time, the name is also a marker of
difference: "Cruise" differentiates the aforementioned films
from the chain of Mad Max (1979), Lethal Weapon (1987)
and Signs (2002) linked by the "Mel Gibson" label.

Star names serve a commercial function similar to
product brand names: a star's name links together a
string of film performances or appearances, labeling the
continuity of certain physical and verbal characteristics
across a number of film performances and so creating a
"branded" identity. Simultaneously, in the crowded mar-
ketplace of films, the star name differentiates a film from
the many others in the market. Continuity and difference
therefore define the function of star names in the com-
merce and culture of cinema.

History demonstrates the significance Hollywood
placed on the names of performers. In the case of
Frances Gumm, it is widely known that MGM renamed

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Stars

Tom Cruise in Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004). © DREAMWORKS/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

her Judy Garland to give the child performer a more
glamorous title. In other cases, renaming worked in the
opposite direction to deexoticize of the performer's
name. When MGM's head of production Louis B.
Mayer supposedly claimed the name of the new contract
player Lucille Fay LeSueur sounded too much like
"sewer," a competition in Photoplay magazine saw mov-
iegoers voting to rename her Joan Crawford. In other
cases, renaming has served to mask the racial or ethnic
roots of performers: for example, when Columbia signed
New York-born dancer Margarita Carmen Casino, her
Spanish patrilineage was obscured when the studio gave
her the more Anglicized name of Rita Hayworth.

While film stars are known for their performances in
films, their fame does not rest upon cinema alone. Aside
from film roles, film stars make numerous appearances in
other media. During the production of a film, stories
frequently appear in magazines or newspapers about a
star's work on the set. It is the role of the unit publicist to
arrange for stories from the production unit about a
film's stars to be prepared and made available to the
press. Once the film is completed, the star becomes one

of the crucial instruments used to market the film. While
the average feature film is a relatively long media text, the
poster or trailer must promote the idea of that film in a
comparatively small amount of space or time. Stars are
therefore frequently foregrounded in these media as a
way to summarize and crystallize the larger body of the
film. For example, posters for As Good As It Gets (1997)
condensed the whole idea of the film into a single image
of Jack Nicholson smiling. The star alone was used to
represent the larger idea of the film and communicate it
directly to the moviegoing public.

Trailers, posters, and advertisements are all forms of
paid promotion. Alongside these marketing channels,
stars are also used to give interviews for newspapers,
magazines, or television. By holding a press conference
or a high-profile premiere with stars in attendance, a film
may gain front page coverage in a newspaper without
paying for print advertisements. While costs are attached
to running such events, these channels are classified not
as paid promotions but rather as publicity, for they give a
film relatively free exposure compared to the high costs of
promotional campaigns.

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Films, together with promotion and publicity, there-
fore result in a star's identity circulating across a range of
media channels. However, for a star's profile to endure,
his or her performances must be critically well received.
Critical opinion, as published through the press, is
important to a performer becoming recognized as a star.
Criticism also works to evaluate stars by circulating opin-
ions about performers. While members of the movie-
going public will ultimately decide whether they like a
star or not, and those responses may or may not corre-
spond with the opinions voiced in published reviews,
professional film criticism nevertheless mediates
responses to films and their performers.

Film stardom is therefore a multiple-media construc-
tion. Promotion, publicity, and criticism provide various
contexts in which the names of stars circulate across a
wide range of mass media. While film stardom cultivates
belief in the power and significance of the extraordinary
individual performer, that individuality is always depend-
ent upon the industrial conditions of mass communica-
tion that plan and organize the circulation of star names;
without those conditions, the making and dissemination
of star identities would be impossible. It is the persistence
of those conditions that has made film stardom a modern
cultural institution.

STAR PERFORMANCE

While film technique has undergone substantial revision
throughout film history, narrative filmmaking has main-
tained certain basic conventions to center and emphasize
the star performer. Leading roles, close-ups, backlighting,
tracking shots, or character-related soundtrack melodies
are just some of the narrative and aesthetic devices repeat-
edly used to isolate and focus on star performers on-
screen. Despite historical differences between styles in
filmmaking, the persistence of these devices for nearly a
century has resulted in the establishment of widely insti-
tuted aesthetic conventions in star performance.

Between the star and the larger ensemble of actors
making up the cast, a distinction can be drawn between
what Richard Maltby (p. 381) describes as the "inte-
grated" and "autonomous" qualities of performances
witnessed in popular cinema. While performances by
the majority of actors appearing in a star-driven feature
film will remain submerged and integrated into the flow
of the narrative, the presentational techniques of star
performance give the stars greater autonomy by lifting
them out of the general narrative to isolate and fore-
ground their actions. When Kate Winslet is first intro-
duced in Titanic (1997), she appears on the crowded pier
in Southampton among the hordes waiting to board the
ship. Centralized and tightened framing, combined with
an overhead craning shot, costume, lighting, and a surge

of the musical score, all serve to differentiate her from the
supporting actors and extras. When Winslet's colead,
Leonardo DiCaprio, is introduced, the camera lurks
behind his head, immediately creating an enigma within
the shot, and the following montage then picks him out
from the three other card players he is seated with. It
would be easy to believe this autonomous quality is a
result of acting or star presence but it is entirely an effect
of film technique.

Throughout film history, stars have become associ-
ated with particular breakthrough performances that
made their reputations: Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu . . .
crea la femme {...And God Created Woman, 1956),
James Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931), Marlene
Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930), Marlon Brando in A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) or Julia Roberts in Pretty
Woman (1990) are just a few examples of performances
that could be regarded in this way. Such performances
not only serve to give the star a widespread public profile
but also become defining statements in that star's on-
screen identity.

Where the entire construction of a film seems to rest
upon the continuity of a star's established qualities, then
it is appropriate to describe such films as "star vehicles,"
for they maximize exposure of the star's distinctive qual-
ities. In the star vehicle, the continuities of a star's on-
screen identity override the differences of character:
whatever the particular role, in the films of Cameron
Diaz or Brad Pitt, the central character always remains
to some extent "Cameron Diaz" or "Brad Pitt." This is
not to say that the star vehicle merely displays the "nat-
ural personality" of the star performer, for the on-screen
identity of the star is as much a performed act as the
individual roles he or she plays.

Star vehicles are frequently constructed in order for a
star to demonstrate a particular feat or skill for which he
or she is well known. After Elvis Presley's rapid rise to
music stardom, the melodrama Love Me Tender (1956),
set immediately after the end of the Civil War, may not
have appeared the most obvious movie debut for him.
However, despite its historical context, the film still
plausibly integrated songs by Elvis into the narrative,
and his subsequent roles in Loving You (1957) and
Jailhouse Rock (1957) fully showcased his contemporary
youth-orientated musical appeal. Similarly, after several
decades working as a performer and director in Hong
Kong cinema, Jackie Chan had acquired a reputation for
his physical performances combining martial arts maneu-
vers with slapstick humor. This mixture of talents was
subsequently foregrounded once Chan moved to
Hollywood, as evident in Rush Hour (1998) and
Shanghai Noon (2000). An Elvis song or Jackie Chan
fight can therefore been seen as an example of the

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Stars

Clint Eastwood brought his western persona to the role of Ditty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

conscious organization of a film's narrative in order to
reserve moments for the performance of the "star turn."

So resonant is the breakthrough performance or star
vehicle that any departure from the roles played in those
contexts is frequently judged through reference to the
familiar type. Critical commentators regarded Jim
Carrey's performances in The Majestic (2001) and
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) as straight
roles aimed at transforming the comedy star's established
on-screen identity. In these cases, Carrey's performances
received a largely positive critical reception. However, in
other cases, the continuity of a star's name may bring
such a weight of expectations to a film that it becomes
impossible for that star to break from type. For example,
When Harry Met Sally (1989) provided Meg Ryan with a
breakthrough role that associated her with the contem-
porary romantic comedy, resulting in further romantic
roles in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and French Kiss (1995).

Through these roles, Ryan's name became so burdened
with generic expectations and a particular character type
that her appearance in the war drama Courage Under Fire
(1996) received uniformly poor reviews, conditioned by
the apparent implausibility of accepting Ryan in a com-
bat drama. Continuity therefore builds but also restricts
the on-screen identities of film stars, and star perform-
ance always rests on a delicate balance between the needs
of continuity and the limitations of typecasting.

STAR STUDIES

Although film stars are widely-known public figures, few
people ever get to meet an actual star in person. Instead,
it is through the combination of film performances,
promotion, publicity, and criticism that film stars reach
the broad moviegoing public. Consequently, films stars
are mediated identities. Somewhere in the world there is
the real Tom Hanks; however, the vast majority of the

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CLINT EASTWOOD

b. Clinton Eastwood, Jr., San Francisco, California, 31 May 1930

In an acting career spanning more than five decades, Clint
Eastwood achieved stardom by epitomizing tough
masculine independence. This image was the product not
only of the characters he played, but of a performance style
that remained emotionally impassive and contained.
Although Eastwood played a variety of roles, his stardom
was defined by those he took in westerns directed by
Sergio Leone and police thrillers directed by Don Siegel.

Following a succession of minor film roles, Eastwood
obtained steady work as the character Rowdy Yates in the
TV western series Rawhide (1959—1966). This generic
association led to Eastwood's casting in Leone's famous
"Dollars Trilogy" of Italian or "spaghetti" westerns: Per
un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1 964) , Per qualche
dollaro in piit (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), and //
Buono, il brutto, il cattivo ( The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly, 1966), in which Eastwood appeared as The Man
With No Name, an anonymous bounty hunter practicing
his trade along the US-Mexican border. Afterward,
Eastwood worked with Siegel in Coogan's Bluff (1 968),
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and Dirty Harry (1971),
where he made his first appearance as San Francisco police
Inspector Harry Callahan, a role he reprised in four later
films.

Eastwood carried the same performance characteristics
across both roles — taciturn manner, emotionless expressions,
deadpan witticisms. No Name and Callahan are singular
men who refuse allegiance to any larger collective or
institution. They represent qualities of independent
individualism that convey broader ideas of social and
political significance. No Name is a mercenary hero, serving
only his own interest and profiting from death. When placed
in the context of the American western, the ambiguity of this
character questions and subverts the moral ground on which
the genre built a sense of national identity. Callahan remains
a more reactionary figure, for while he cannot align himself
with the institutionalized law, which he regards as

inadequate to maintaining social order, he searches for a
more effective moral code that legitimates the enforcer's use
of brutality, torture, and gun violence. In both cases,
Eastwood's emotionless acting underscored the moral
ambivalence of the characters.

Eastwood made further westerns, including The
Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Pale Rider (1985), while
the final outing for the Callahan character came with The
Dead Pool (1988). Although the Leone and Siegel films
continued to define Eastwood's image, he diversified his
generic range by appearing in comedy (Every Which Way
But Loose, 1978) and romantic drama (The Bridges of
Madison County, 1995). Alongside his acting, Play Misty
for Me (1971) and High Plains Drifter (1973) also
established Eastwood as a critically praised director, and he
won Oscars® for his directing of Unforgiven (1992) and
Million Dollar Baby (2004).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

As Actor: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964),
// Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly, 1966), Dirty Harry (1971); As Actor and Director:
Play Misty for Me (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973),
Unforgiven (1992), Million Dollar Baby (2004); As
Director: Bird (1988), Mystic River (2003)

FURTHER READING

Beard, William. Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint
Eastwood. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000.

Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of
James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Kapsis, Robert E., and Kathie Coblentz, eds. Clint Eastwood:
Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. New York:
Knopf, 1996.

Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Paul McDonald

public will know only the mediated Tom Hanks. Films,
promotion or publicity materials, and criticism are vari-
ous forms of textual materials that mediate the identities
of stars. As star texts cluster around a given name, they
define the identities of individual stars, and as they

accumulate over time, they also form a public sense of
film stardom in general.

It was a focus on the mediation of star identities
which, during the late 1970s, stimulated and energized
the growth of star studies as a distinct stream of research

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Stars

Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name in II Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

in film scholarship. The key to this development was the
original publication in 1979 of Richard Dyer's book
Stars. Dyer drew on historical, sociological, and psycho-
logical works to review previous scholarship on film stars
and presented his own fresh approach to the study of film
stardom. He did not contemplate the biographical truth
of a star — the star-as-person — but concentrated instead
on what he described as the "star image." Although the
term "image" may suggest that Dyer was interested only
in the visual texts mediating star identities, he empha-
sized that the study of star images must encompass the
whole range of visual, verbal, and auditory star texts
circulated through films, promotion, publicity, and
criticism.

Dyer's approach was grounded in a semiotic form of
analysis, in which a star's performance in a film is con-
structed across a combination of signs: visual (for exam-
ple, hair color or style, the shapes of facial features,
aspects of physical build, gestures, and costume), verbal
(words spoken from a script or familiar turns of phrase)

and nonverbal (the speed and volume of the voice, or
dialect). Together these signs combine to form the star's
on-screen image.

A star's performances produce the on-screen image
but DeCordova argues that American cinema did not
achieve a fully formed star system until the second decade
of the twentieth century, when the press and other media
began to run stories covering the private lives of stars.
This trend has continued ever since with newspapers and
magazines publishing stories and photos relating to the
social events a star has attended, whom he or she is
dating, his or her tastes in fashion, or the star's home.
As these materials multiply the volume of signs in circu-
lation about a star, they work to produce his or her off-
screen image.

Fundamental to Dyer's perspective was a regard for
film stars as constructed images. At the most basic level, a
star's image is constructed because at any moment an
actor's performance is formed through the confluence of

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many signs and meanings. Star images are also intertex-
tual constructions, for they are produced through the
sharing and linking of meanings between a variety of
sources of star texts. Finally, the meanings attached to
any of the signs that make up the star's image are con-
tingent upon particular historical and cultural circum-
stances. At different historical moments, images of
different stars have defined audiences' ideas of beauty or
desirability, for example. Star images are therefore cul-
tural constructions, for the signs they present and the
meanings they generate are products of the cultural cir-
cumstances in which they are circulated and read.

When the star-as-person is replaced by the star-as-
image, the significance of particular stars is no longer
explained by recourse to ineffable essential qualities of
charisma or magnetism but rather through exploring how
a star's significance is, or was, constructed through the
tangible textual materials by which the images of stars are
circulated.

Reading stars as images concentrates on regarding
film stars as mediated identities. Such images are never
the straightforward or transparent portrayal of the real
personality of a star, but rather, represent an identity
made and circulated through channels of mass commu-
nication. Whatever meanings are generated through
those images may or may not correspond to the actual
personality of a star; however, this does not mean the star
image is something supplementary, untrue, or inauthen-
tic, behind which lies the hidden truth of the real star.
Instead, star image studies regard the image as the only
means by which the public knows a star, and so assume
that the truth or reality of any star is in the image. It is
the work of analysis, then, to show how the various signs
and texts that construct the image of a star serve to
produce meaning and thereby construct what is known
about a star.

Dyer's star-image approach considered how the
meanings of star images are formed through, and repro-
duce, wider belief systems in society. At one level, star
images provide us with the identities by which we are
able to conceptualize distinct individual star identities,
for example "Zeenat Aman," 'Amitabh Bachchan,"
"Theda Bara," "Maurice Chevalier," "David Niven,"
"Shirley Temple" or "Bruce Willis." Each name repre-
sents an individual unique star identity. Equally, how-
ever, and in a contradictory manner, star images are also
important for their typicality rather than their unique-
ness. Star images are marketable or intelligible to the
broad moviegoing public only because they represent
socially and culturally shared meanings of masculinity
or femininity, ethnicity, national identity, sexuality, or
maturity, for example. Star images are therefore always

socially meaningful images, and it is in their social sig-
nificance that their ideological meaning can be read.

As a socially meaningful image, the significance of
any star image inside the cinema is always the result of
meanings produced outside the cinema, elsewhere in
society. Dyer further explored the relations between star
images and society in his 1987 study Heavenly Bodies:
Film Stars and Society. Here he enriched the study of star
images by seeking to situate the meanings of stars histor-
ically, taking star texts and attending to how their ideo-
logical significance related to the context in which they
circulated. For his study of Marilyn Monroe (1926-
1962) in Heavenly Bodies, Dyer used the sexiness of
Monroe's image to consider the historical significance
of her image in relation to ideas of sexuality and femi-
ninity at the time she first reached stardom in 1950s
America. He explored how that image in the early
1950s was consistent with beliefs about the naturalness
and innocence of sexuality, promoted in particular
through the men's magazine Playboy, first published in
1953. For Dyer, the Monroe image appeared to enact
the Playboy "philosophy" (p. 28). As Playboy addressed
its male readership about the truth and naturalness of
sex, so Monroe's image appeared to unproblematically
affirm the correspondence of female sexuality to those
beliefs.

By constructing his sense of context in this way,
Dyer did not seek to situate his reading of Monroe and
sexuality in relation to actual sexual practice in the 1950s.
Rather, he interpreted Monroe through the ideas or
discourses of sexuality circulating in the era, a collection
of texts coexisting within a context of other texts, which
together constructed notions of sexual truth and pleasure
during the 1950s. If Stars made the study of star images
into a work of intertextual analysis, that is, reading across
a range of textual materials to see how they constructed
the mediated identity of the star, then Heavenly Bodies
extended that work into an interdiscursive realm by
considering how the images of stars related to broader
clusters of ideas and perceptions in circulation.

STARS AND MOVIEGOERS

Films, promotion, publicity, and criticism make film
stardom dependent on industrially organized channels
of mass communication to publicly circulate the names
and identities of stars. Equally, film stardom requires a
mass audience for the movies. The relationships formed
between moviegoers and film stars can be conceptualized
in various ways.

As already suggested, star names are part of the
marketing address that the film industry makes to poten-
tial moviegoers. Stars may influence choices in both
positive and negative ways, for a moviegoer may choose

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LILLIAN GISH

b. Lillian Diana de Guiche, Springfield, Ohio, 14 October 1893, d. 27 February 1993

Lillian Gish was one of the first female stars of American
cinema, best known for her performances in silent films
but the recipient of an honorary Academy Award® in
1970 "for superlative artistry and for distinguished
contribution to the progress of motion pictures" during an
exceptionally long career.

After working as child stage actors, Lillian and her
younger sister Dorothy joined the Biograph Company in
1912. There they worked with the director D. W. Griffith,
making their screen debuts in the one-reel An Unseen
Enemy (1912) and becoming part of his repertory
company of actors.

Gish's rise to stardom came as Griffith moved to
feature film production. After appearing as one of the four
leads in The Birth of a Nation (1915), she took leading
roles in Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918), True Heart
Susie (1919), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East
(1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921). While Gish's
screen career lasted seventy-five years, during which she
was cast in a variety of parts and worked with many
directors, her roles in Griffith's films largely defined her
on-screen image as the victimized child-woman.

Despite the various roles she played during the
silent period, Gish's image was dominated by a
particular character type: a fragile young woman,
epitomizing innocence and virtue, whose goodness is
wrongly judged and/or brutally punished. Frequently
placed in dramatic situations in which her characters
were vulnerable to injustice and deceit, Gish repeatedly
portrayed ethereality and unworldliness. Although
victimized by the evils of society, Gish's child-woman
characters nevertheless represented an independent spirit
ready to confront and challenge the dangers of a hostile
world. Through repetition and similarity, these roles
produced a strong association between star and genre,

with Gish's image operating as a sign of virtue in silent
melodrama.

Gish's image was equally based on her uniqueness.
Her contemporary, Mary Pickford, similarly displayed
childlike virtue in many roles, but Pickford's portrayals
never carried the same ethereal or unworldly qualities as
Gish's, instead provoking a sense of energy and health that
gained her the label 'America's Sweetheart." Ethereality
also became a significant aspect of the off-screen image of
Gish. Journalists and other commentators frequently
noted her leisure-time commitment to reading classic
literature or poetry as indicating a solitude and serious
manner appropriate to her tragic roles. Press commentary
therefore worked to create a fit between on- and off-screen
images, constructing Gish's private life as the complement
to the lives of her characters.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Birth of a Nation (1915), Hearts of the World (1918),
Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans
of the Storm (1921), The Scarlet Letter (1926), The Wind
(1928), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Cobweb (1955), The
Night of the Hunter (1955)

FURTHER READING

Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. New

York: Scribner, 2001.
. Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis. New York: Dutton,

1977.

Gish, Lillian, with Ann Pinchot. Lillian Gish: The Movies,
Mr. Griffith and Me. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1969.

Slide, Anthony. Silent Players: A Biographical and

Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and
Actresses. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

Silver, Charles, ed. Lillian Gish. New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1980.

Paul McDonald

to avoid a film precisely because it features John Travolta
or Demi Moore just as much as another moviegoer may
decide to see it for the same reason.

Stars may also become figures with which audiences
identify in films. By foregrounding the performance of

the star, narrative cinema creates the star's character as a
figure of central narrative agency, and so the moviegoer
frequently follows and understands the plot largely
through the actions and reactions of the character played
by the star. In some cases, scenes are constructed to place

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Stars

Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919).

EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

the moviegoer in a position to see and hear what the
star's character witnesses. For example, In What Lies
Beneath (2000), Michele Pfeiffer lies drugged and immo-
bile in a bathtub filling with water as her murderous
husband attempts to fake her suicide. The scene is shot
and edited to place the moviegoer in a position to build
identification with the star's subjective viewpoint.

Aside from showing what the star's character sees,
other techniques are frequently used to encourage under-
standing of, and identification with, what the star's char-
acter knows or feels. Again in What Lies Beneath, one
sequence involves Pfeiffer's character Claire in her daugh-
ter's bedroom discovering an old vest from her days as a
music student at Juilliard. This sets off a chain of remem-
brances as she then leafs through a photo album in the
basement. A range of emotional changes occurs during
the sequence, from wistful longing to sadness and anxi-
ety. These are not registered by Pfeiffer's acting, for the
camera only occasionally looks at her. Instead, the musi-
cal score carries over from bedroom to basement, shifting
in tone to convey Claire's range of feelings. Here the
moviegoer is able to understand the star character's emo-

tional point of view through the music. Identification
with a star can therefore be achieved through various
visual and aural techniques and these work independently
of whether the moviegoer does or does not like a star:
they do not depend on audience taste but rather are the
effects of how image and sound work to direct and
structure relations between the moviegoer and the pres-
ence of the star in the narrative.

Subjective viewpoint shots or point of view devices
work to position moviegoers with the experience of the
star's character in the narrative. In this case the relation
between star and moviegoer is constructed through what
the film does to the audience. However, the processes of
identification involved with the star/moviegoer relation-
ship are more complex than that. While films may place
moviegoers in positions of identification with stars, the
question still remains — what is it about stars that fasci-
nates moviegoers? For Dyer, star images enthrall because
they are able to draw together contradictory ideological
meanings in the one figure: Monroe signified both inno-
cence and sexiness in equal measure. John Ellis, in his
1992 book Visible Fictions, has suggested the off-screen
images of stars provide audiences with only a scattering of
elements from reviews, interviews, or gossip, which leave
an incoherent and incomplete sense of the star.
Moviegoers are drawn to seeing stars perform in films,
Ellis argues, because it is only in those appearances that
the various elements are brought together at a point of
coherence and completion. Ellis also understands the
relationship between star and moviegoer through various
psychoanalytic concepts. As the film performance allows
moviegoers to spy on figures apparently unaware they are
being watched, there is a voyeuristic component to
watching stars. Since stars appear to be both ordinary
and extraordinary, they are also similar to and different
from moviegoers. This closeness and distance makes the
star an object of desire, for the star is simultaneously
accessible and inaccessible. For psychoanalytic film
theory, the identificatory relationship between the movie-
goer and the star is based on star images providing ego
ideals, making up for deficiencies or divisions in the self
by presenting identities who appear to be complete and
lacking nothing.

A crucial problem with these broad-based theories is
that they tend to generalize the way in which moviegoers
relate to stars. Moviegoers form a far wider array of
responses to stars, combining adoration, esteem, and
respect with feelings of loathing, disdain, and contempt.
In a study of letters from female moviegoers remember-
ing the pleasures they had found in watching female
stars of 1940s cinema, Jackie Stacey, in her 1994 book
Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship,
noted how identification took a variety of forms both
inside and outside the movie theater. Inside the theater,

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163

Stars

moviegoers related experiences of forming a loyal attach-
ment to a star, regarding a star as different and unattain-
able, or otherwise losing a sense of self by fantasizing
about becoming the star. Stacey describes this range of
identificatory fantasies as instances of "devotion," "wor-
ship," and "transcendence." Outside the theater, identi-
fication continued, as women described make-believe
games of pretending to be the star or otherwise imitating
a star's behavior, foregrounding an actual physical resem-
blance to the star, or copying the star's style. Here iden-
tification took various practical forms that extended the
significance of a star image beyond the theater and into
the everyday lives of moviegoers.

In these cases, identification was the product not of
what the film did to the moviegoer, but rather what the
moviegoer did with a star image. Stacey's research there-
fore began to point toward some of the identificatory
relationships formed between moviegoers and film stars.
Stacey's work provided valuable ground for beginning to
think about the complex variety of emotional responses
moviegoers have to stars and the manners in which they
enact those relationships.

SEE ALSO Acting; Fans and Fandom; Journals and
Magazines; Reception Theory; Spectatorship and
Audiences; Star System; Studio System

FURTHER READING

DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the
Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1990.

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New
York: St. Martin's, 1986.

. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979.

Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London
and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Gledhill, Christine, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London and
New York: Routledge, 1991.

King, Barry. "Articulating Stardom." Screen 26, no. 5 (1985):
27-50.

Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. Maiden, MA:
Blackwell, 2003.

McDonald, Paul. "Reconceptualising Stardom." In Stars, edited
by Richard Dyer, 175-211. London: British Film Institute,
1998. Original edition published in 1979.

. "Star Studies." In Approaches to Popular Film, edited by

Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich, 79-97. Manchester,
UK and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female
Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Paul McDonald

164

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

STRUCTURALISM AND
POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Structuralism and poststructuralism are theoretical atti-
tudes arising out of film studies' "linguistic turn" — the
attempt to reconceptualize cinema using language as an
explanatory paradigm — in the 1960s and 1970s. At this
time, the discipline was just beginning to attain footing
as a serious field of scholarly inquiry and become an
established presence as an academic department at uni-
versities. In many ways symptomatic of the fledgling
field's anxiety about being taken seriously, the structur-
alist movement's claim to a scientific approach to
criticism was very appealing to film theorists looking to
move beyond "film appreciation." Poststructuralism
would both refine and overturn structuralist assumptions;
where the structuralist impulse was to erect systems,
poststructuralists looked for gaps and ruptures therein.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD: STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism is, broadly defined, an approach to human
activity that sees it as analyzable in terms of networks of
relationships; objects derive meaning from their positions
in these relationships. Structural analysis attempts to
equalize all texts (and forms of texts) by reducing them
to the same underlying universal system. This system was
articulated through the vocabulary of classical structural
linguistics. The linguistic terminology found in
Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
(compiled posthumously by his students and published
in 1915) was particularly influential on the shape of the
structuralist method. The ideas collected in this volume
seek to outline a modern linguistics, but simultaneously
envisage the conceptual framework for a general science

of signs: "semiology" in his parlance. As a "science of
signs, signifiyers, and signifying systems," semiotics — as
semiology is now more commonly called — had a pro-
found role in both structuralist and poststructuralist
thought.

Saussure's semiotics was quickly appropriated by
thinkers seeking a rigorous system to decipher myths
and literature, particularly by Russians and Czechs.
Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale (1929),
for example, dissected the general structure of one hun-
dred Russian folktales by determining which elements
were constant and which were variable. Propp concluded
that nearly all the tales in his analysis had the same basic
structure. The various characters could fit into several
categories of dramatis personae (hero, villain, victim,
and so on); the various events contained in the stories
could be classified into thirty-one possible actions and
always occurred in the same order.

Although Propp and others pioneered a structuralist
approach in the 1920s, it would take until the 1960s for
structural analysis to take root and blossom in Western
Europe and North America as a method for understand-
ing a whole range of cultural phenomena. In the 1960s
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied
Saussurean principles to his study of mythology and
kinship systems. His bold transfer of structural-linguistic
logic began the drive toward structural analysis in a host
of fields, including literature and film studies.

In his anthropological work, Levi-Strauss sought a
unifying system that could explain why similar myths

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165

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

appear in very different cultures. Myths derive their sig-
nificance, according to his research in Structural
Anthropology (1963), not from their individual elements,
but rather from "bundles of relations." Applying to
diverse mythologies Saussure's insights into binarism
(that language derives meaning from difference: the word
apple is insignificant and arbitrary as an individual unit;
only because it is unique vis-a-vis the word pear and every
other word can it be meaningful for human interaction),
Levi-Strauss demonstrated how myths function like
Saussure's theory of language. No individual part of a
myth has meaning in isolation; it acquires significance
only in its relationship to the other elements in the
myth's structure. Following from this, a single myth is
first meaningful when it is situated among other myths,
social practices, and kinship systems. For Levi-Strauss,
myths are universal, timeless stories whose ultimate func-
tion is to represent the resolution of social conflict.

Structuralist analysis became fashionable. Reflecting
the method's quest for the universal, scholars began
ferreting out underlying systems in all sorts of fields.
Applying structuralist methodologies to individual liter-
ary works and genres, Tzvetan Todorov claimed that
narrative fiction can be studied on three levels: the
semantic (the content), the syntactic (structures, rela-
tions, and combinatory rules), and the rhetorical (dic-
tion, point of view). Todorov identified cultural laws that
appear and drive every story, hidden codes operating
silently just below the texts' surfaces but made legible
by the structuralist method's deductive impulse.

Since structuralism's appeal lay in its ability to apply
systematic, scientific rigor to fields traditionally analyzed
in highly subjective and even impressionistic ways, it is
no surprise that the 1960s saw structural analysis move
from established academic departments such as literature
and anthropology to areas hitherto deemed unworthy of
scholarly inquiry. The early work of Roland Barthes, for
example, extended structuralist thought to a variety of
contemporary systems including advertising, fashion, and
food. It was in this period that structuralism seemed the
logical methodology for addressing another cultural phe-
nomenon just beginning to be taken seriously: film. The
insights of pioneers such as Levi-Strauss and Todorov
provided exciting possibilities for film scholars. The net-
work of repetitions and differences that structural analysis
systematizes could be used to create "scientific" interpre-
tations of films that could supplant journalistic-style
"film appreciation" criticism (the dominant mode of
film analysis through the mid-1960s). Film studies would
thus enjoy a significant but brief encounter with struc-
turalism, approaching cinema with structuralist-informed
genre analyses, auteurist criticism, and narrative investi-
gations. Jim Kitses pioneered this approach in Horizons
West (1969), looking at the genre of the western.

Will Wright's Six Guns and Society: A Structural
Study of the Western (1975) was another important struc-
turalist genre analysis. Drawing heavily on Saussurean
linguistics, Levi-Strauss's conceptual structure of tribal
myths, Propp's morphology of the Russian folktale, and
the political and economic theories of John Kenneth
Galbraith and Jiirgen Habermas, Wright outlines the
"structure" of the western film. Among the sixty-four
top-grossing westerns released since 1930, Wright pro-
posed that fifty-five of them conformed to one of four
basic plot lines. Wright's structural analysis of the west-
ern's thematics made an easy transition from Propp and
Todorov's studies; here, too, the task was to deduce a
formula for a genre. Wright's scheme of narrative func-
tion echoed Propp's list of thirty-one possible actions in
the folktale. Symptomatic is the extent to which literary,
social, political, and economic theory informed Wright's
study. Even through the 1970s, film scholars sought to
justify and ground their analyses in theoretical insights
derived within "established" fields.

Auteur-structuralism, practiced most famously in
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's monograph Luchino Visconti
(1967) and then subsequently theorized by Peter
Wollen in his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
(1969), sought an underlying structure of stylistic or
thematic motifs as the defining characteristic of the film
author's work. These characteristics were not always
immediately apparent, nor was the author necessarily
aware of them. Film scholars also used structuralist
insights to perform individual film analyses. Raymond
Bellour's 1972 study of The Birds (1963), for example,
breaks down the Bodega Bay sequence into a shot-by-
shot analysis; Peter Wollen's 1976 investigation of North
by Northwest (1959) performs a "morphological analysis"
of the film in the spirit of Propp.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM: FROM
SYSTEM TO SUBVERSION

Beginning in the late 1960s a group of theorists led by
Jacques Derrida began to challenge the very basic
assumptions that had informed structuralist thought,
starting with its cornerstone, Saussurean semiotics.
These attacks followed once the initial enthusiasm for
structuralism began to wane. Less a theory than an inter-
pretive attitude, poststructuralism in its broadest sense
refers to an attention towards those elements unex-
plained, excluded, or repressed by structuralism's tidy
systems, as well as a general distrust in systematicity in
general. There is debate among scholars as to whether
poststructuralism should be seen as an extension of struc-
turalism or whether it constitutes a negation, a kind of
antistructuralism. Some argue it is not antistructural since
many poststructuralists used the semiotic terminology

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Structuralism and Poststructuralism

that informed structuralist thought. In its most gen-
eral sense, poststructuralism — linked to thinkers such as
Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, to
Barthes's later work, and above all to Derrida — is char-
acterized by a suspicion of totalizing systems and a radical
skepticism towards theories which attempt to explain
human activity, such as Marxism, Christianity, and even
structuralism. If structuralism set out to erect systems of
binary oppositions, for instance, poststructuralists con-
cerned themselves with instances in which systems break
down or are subverted.

For poststructuralists, a "text" was no longer a fin-
ished, self-contained object that could be "explained" by
the analyst, thereby rejecting the assumption under
which structuralists had operated. Rather, according to
Derrida, the text — whether literature, film, advertise-
ment, or any cultural form — is first produced in the act
of "reading," or interpretation. Although poststructural-
ists still deployed semiological terminology (sign, signi-
fier, signified), they did so to criticize notions of stable
signifying systems (although many poststructuralists were
in fact Marxists).

Poststructuralism took film studies in new and often
disparate directions. Unlike literary studies, Derridean
deconstruction did not typically exert an immediate
influence; film scholars tended to apply Derrida's sub-
versive spirit to their interpretations, rather than organize
their thoughts around any of his ideas. One strain, found
above all in French journals such as Cahiers du cinema
and Cinetique, latched onto structuralist-Marxist Louis
Althusser's concept of ideology in an effort to "demy-
thologize" or "denaturalize" film — that is, to reveal the
hidden cultural and ideological codes which underpin
cinematic (especially Hollywood) signification. One
famous example is the 1972 collective Cahiers du cinema
on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which "read"
or "rescanned" the film for moments where the director's
"inscription" of a unique "writing" created spaces in the
text which escaped the dominant ideology. This brand of
analysis, sometimes referred to as a "deconstructive read-
ing," essentially looked for what Derrida called "play" —
the space in which structure is transformed and decen-
tered — as an alternative approach to auteurist criticism.
Another poststructuralist offshoot, Lacanian psychoanal-
ysis, offered a further alternative to classic structuralist
film analysis. Figures such as Christian Metz connected
Lacan's reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud's theories to
structural linguistics for the way in which both deal
directly with signification. Metz called this hybrid theo-
retical matrix the "semio-psychoanalysis of the cinema."

Some scholars did attempt to apply Derrida directly.
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier's work, in particular
Le Texte divise (1981), extends to the cinema Derrida's

notion of ecriture (a conception of signification based on
unfixable rather than stable signs). For Ropars-
Wuilleumier, the Derridean hieroglyph (composed of
both graphic representations of speech and pictorial ele-
ments) resembles Sergei Eisenstein's montage theory.
Both make meaning based on juxtapositions which dis-
rupt the image itself. Peter Brunette and David Wills's
Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (1989) imagines an
"anagrammatical" film analysis. On facing pages they
"read" Francois Truffaut's La Mariee etait en noir {The
Bride Wore Black, 1967) and David Lynch's Blue Velvet
(1986) in order to demonstrate textual "undecidabilities"
and "fissures," moments where the stability of the texts'
meaning breaks down. In so doing they seek to expose
deconstruction as less a specific theory that can be
applied to interpret a film than a questioning attitude
or suspicion with which one approaches a text.

The support for cinema studies' "linguistic turn" has
eroded in recent years. Critics have opined that semiotic
language has been abused as a jargon used to supply a
facade of scientific sophistication. For them, structuralism
is essentialist, and its focus on form obscures thematic
content and ideological superstructures; structuralism's
claim that objects exist only in their relation to one
another causes its analyses to be synchronic (ahistorical)
rather than diachronic (historical). This absence of history
is troubling to many. Poststructuralism, too, has come
under attack for its own contradictions. Some critics have
noted that a mode supposedly devoted to discovering
moments where unities and systems break down has itself
become a totalizing system. In general, film scholars have
been particularly keen to depart from a theoretical para-
digm based in linguistics; rather, film studies should
develop a vocabulary appropriate to discussing the
medium on its own terms. Despite these criticisms,
however, one must acknowledge the lasting effects of
structuralism and poststructuralism on the process of
interpretation in the field of film studies. Structuralism's
scientific method helped advance film studies beyond the
discourse of film appreciation. Poststructuralism, for its
part, leaves behind a critical climate which encourages
long-held assumptions to be challenged, invigorating our
understanding of the medium.

SEE ALSO Film Studies; Narrative; Psychoanalysis;
Semiotics

FURTHER READING

Bellour, Raymond. "System of a Fragment (on The Birds)!' In
The Analysis of 'Film, edited by Constance Penley, 28-68.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000 [1972].

Brunette, Peter, and David Wills. Screen/Play: Derrida and Film
Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Cahiers du cinema. "John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln: A Collective
Text by the Editors of Cahiers du cinema!' In Narrative,

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

167

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip
Rosen, 444-482. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985 [1972].

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences." Writing and Difference. Translated by
Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001 [1970].

Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford
to Clint Eastwood. London: British Film Institute, 2004
[1969].

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology . London: Penguin,
1972 [1963].

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti. London: British Film

Institute, 1967.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Translated by

Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. Le Texte divise: essai sur

Tecriture filmique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by
Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration of
Albert Riedlinger, translated by Roy Harris. London:
Duckworth, 1983 [1915].

Wollen, Peter. "North by Northwest: A Morphological Analysis."
Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies. London:
Verso, 1982 [1976].

. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington:

University of Indiana Press, 1972 [1969].
Wright, Will. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the

Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Mattias Frey

168

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

STUDIO SYSTEM

Since the advent of commercial cinema over a century
ago, the costs and complexity of filmmaking have
encouraged producers to develop a factory-oriented
approach to production. The benefits of such an
approach include the centralization of both production
and management; the division and detailed subdivision
of labor; a standardized mode of production, film style,
and type of product; cost efficiencies derived from econo-
mies of scale; consistent production values; and the culti-
vation of a brand name in the movie marketplace. This
approach coalesced in Hollywood, California in the
1910s, when that locale became the nexus of commercial
film production in the United States. The dominant
firms referred to their production facilities as "studios,"
which invoked the more artistic aspects of filmmaking,
although operations were modeled on the kind of mass
production that Henry Ford (1863-1947) was introduc-
ing to the auto industry at the time.

The Hollywood studios that emerged in the 1910s
and 1920s — Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., et al. —
complemented their factory-based production operations
with common business practices that enabled them to
collectively dominate the movie industry in the US and,
increasingly, overseas as well. The fact that most of the
early studios still dominate the industry on a global scale
underscores their capacity to adapt and survive, although
they no longer control the industry to anywhere near the
extent that they did from the 1920s to through the
1940s, during Hollywood's so-called classical era, when
the studio system was at its height, and when the studios'
collective dominion at home and abroad established
Hollywood as a national cinema with tremendous global
currency. Film studios in other countries have enjoyed
great success for periods of time, occasionally to the

extent that the terms "studio system" and "national
cinema" apply to them as well. This success often coin-
cided with the national and international popularity of a
particular type of product or film style, as with Ufa and
German Expressionism in the 1920s, or the remarkable
run of Alfred Hitchcock-directed thrillers from Gaumont
British Distributors Ltd. in the 1930s. In some instances,
sheer size and volume of output put a studio on the
global or regional map, as with Germany's Ufa, Italy's
Cinecitta, and a few others. But only India's
"Bollywood" has developed a studio system comparable
to Hollywood's. Like the US film industry, India's
emerged in the 1910s and 1920s in a major west-coast
city, Bombay (now Mumbai), and developed a factory-
based mode of production dominated by a number of
powerful firms. Bollywood, like Hollywood, is a relent-
lessly market-driven industry geared for stars, genres, and
standardized film styles, but it remains far more produc-
tive, turning out some eight hundred features per year —
although a key distinction from Hollywood has been
Bollywood's focus on its domestic and regional markets.

In the larger global context, Hollywood has been the
dominant force throughout motion picture history due
to the studio's collective control of distribution as well as
production. This control diminished considerably in the
postwar era due to the rise in independent production
and freelance talent, as well as the threat of television and
other new media, and it has eroded even further since the
1980s as the studios became subdivisions of global media
conglomerates like Sony, Viacom, News Corporation,
and General Electric. Still, the Hollywood studios are
the strongest shaping forces in the movie industry, and
their operations today are a fundamental extension of the
system that they established at their inception.

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169

Studio System

THOMAS H. INCE

b. Thomas Harper Ince, Newport, Rhode Island, 6 November 1882,
d. on or about 19 November 1924

Thomas Ince wielded enormous influence over the
Hollywood studio system, particularly the factory-based
mode of production that came to characterize it. Ince
wrote, directed, and produced scores of top features from
1914 until his untimely death in 1924, but his most
important contributions involved not individual films but
the filmmaking process. More than any other Hollywood
pioneer, Ince anticipated and effectively defined the roles
of film producer and production executive during the
nascent studio era. And as a one-man writing staff who
supervised every stage of production and eventual release,
Ince also was a consummate creative producer and
innovative entrepreneur who maintained a steady
output of high-quality, commercially successful films.
In the process, he refined a number of key aspects of
the emerging system, from the shooting script as a
blueprint for production to the centralized studio
system and the assembly-line construction of multiple
films.

Born into a show-business family (his parents were
stage actors), Ince moved from stage to screen early in his
career, and in 1911 moved from New York to Hollywood,
where he soon gained a reputation as the director (and
frequently the writer) of hundreds of shorts, many of them
two-reel westerns starring William S. Hart. He directed his
first feature, The Battle of Gettysburg, in 1913, although by
then his interests were turning toward producing. In 1915,
he joined D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett to form
Triangle Pictures, one of Hollywood's first major
independent production companies. Ince enjoyed
immediate success with feature-length hits like The
Coward (1915) and Civilization (1916), and in 1916 he
constructed his own studio in Culver City, California.
Known as "Inceville," years later it became the home of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

By then Ince had abandoned directing altogether,
concentrating instead on developing the resources and
procedures for the systematic production of quality films.
He supervised all production at his studio, personally
scripting many of the films and insisting on strict adherence
to detailed shooting scripts. He built a stable of contract
stars and directors and kept a Wild West show on the lot to
enhance the production value of his westerns, which were
produced on a sprawling back lot that comprised thousands
of acres. Willful and often difficult, Ince had a falling out
with his Triangle partners, who took with them many of his
key filmmaking talent as well, most notably Hart, when the
partnership dissolved. He also shifted from Paramount to
Metro to First National as his distributor, always looking
for ways to optimize both his authority and his income.

Ince's career was cut short by his mysterious death
during an outing aboard William Randolph Hearst's
private yacht — a now-legendary incident that has
overshadowed his accomplishments as one of the chief
architects of the Hollywood studio system.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Battle of Gettysburg (1913), The Coward (1915),

Civilization (1916), Hell's Hinges (1916), Anna Christie
(1923)

FURTHER READING

Koszarski, Richard. An Evenings Entertainment: The Age of the
Silent Feature Picture, 1915—1928. New York: Scribners,
1990.

Pratt, George. Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent
Film. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Staiger, Janet. "Dividing Labor for Production Control:
Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System." In
The American Movie Industry, edited by Gorham Kindem,
94-103. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1982.

Thoh

Schatz

THE EMERGENCE OF THE HOLLYWOOD
STUDIO SYSTEM

The first Hollywood studios emerged between 1912 and
1915, as US filmmaking migrated to the Los Angeles area
and quickly developed a standardized mode of produc-
tion. Several major firms built massive filmmaking facto-

ries to accommodate the rapidly expanding industry, the
most significant being Universal City, by far the largest
in the world when it was completed in 1915- Meanwhile,
smaller, independent producers developed modest oper-
ations geared for the efficient, systematic output of par-
ticular types of film — Thomas H. Ince's (1882-1924)

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Studio System

Thomas Ince. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY

two-reel westerns, for instance, and Mack Sennett's
(1880-1960) comedy shorts. Ince in particular refined a
range of production practices to ensure cost efficiency
and quality control, including centralized management,
shooting scripts as blueprints for production, and a clear
division of work roles in an assembly-line operation. The
larger studios refined similar practices on a grander scale,
enabling them to produce an enormous volume of pic-
tures — up to 250 features, shorts, and serials per year in
the case of Universal Pictures.

Another key aspect of the emerging studio system
was the vertical integration of film production, distribu-
tion, and exhibition within a single corporation. The
prime mover here was Paramount Pictures, created via
the 1916 merger of a nationwide distributor, Paramount,
with two production companies, Famous Players in New
York and the Lasky Corporation in Los Angeles. The
merger was engineered by Adolph Zukor (1873-1976),
who soon controlled the entire operation and thus
became the prototypical movie mogul. Zukor's bicoastal
operation turned out over one-hundred feature films

per year and threatened to corner the market, provoking
a group of theater owners to join forces as the First
National Exhibitors' Circuit Inc., a nationwide distribution
company, and to create a West Coast production studio.

Soon Paramount and First National were competing
for top talent, paying them record sums but increasingly
controlling their careers. This led three major stars,
Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), Mary Pickford (1892-
1979), and Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939), along with
producer-director D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), to create
United Artists in 1919, defying the burgeoning studio
system but scarcely stemming its development. By then
Zukor was moving into exhibition, an expansion effort
that peaked with the 1925 acquisition of the Balaban
theater. Some studios, notably Fox, Warner Bros., and
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — developed vertically integrated
companies via expansion or merger. Hollywood's corpo-
rate power structure fully coalesced with the coming of
sound in the late 1920s, when the massive costs of sound
conversion and ensuing "talkie boom" weeded out the
weaker companies and consolidated the majors' collective
control. Talking pictures also spawned RKO (Radio-
Keith-Orpheum) Radio Pictures, a fully integrated studio
created via merger in 1928 by David Sarnoff, head of
RCA (Radio Corporation of America), the parent com-
pany of RKO (as well as NBC) and a key force in the
coming of sound.

The talkie boom carried Hollywood to its best year
ever in 1930, despite the October 1929 stock market
crash. The Depression did hit Hollywood with a venge-
ance in 1931 and 1932, although by then the basic
contours of the studio system were firmly in place. The
dominant powers were the Big Eight producer-
distributors, which included two distinct classes of
studios: the Big Five integrated majors — Paramount,
MGM, Fox (later Twentieth Century Fox), Warner
Bros., and RKO — whose theater chains gave them distinct
advantages in size, resources, and market leverage; and the
Little Three — Universal, Columbia, and United Artists —
which produced top features and boasted nationwide
distribution circuits but did not own their own theaters.
The Big Five's superior resources enabled them to turn out
a higher proportion of A-class films, while Columbia and
Universal relied far more heavily on second-rate products.
United Artists, meanwhile, saw its mission change as the
founder-owners became less active, and by 1930 func-
tioned mainly as a distributor for a handful of major
independent producers. "Poverty Row" studios like
Monogram and (later) Republic rounded out the system,
which produced low-grade B movies but had no distribu-
tion or exhibition operations.

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Studio System

Key to the studio system was the Big Eight's domi-
nation of all areas of the industry. They enjoyed a
monopoly over feature film distribution in the US and
exercised indirect control of exhibition via trade practices,
most notable a run-zone-clearance system that dictated
the flow of film product through all of the nation's
theaters, as well as block booking and blind bidding
policies that forced theater owners to take a studio's
entire annual output, sight unseen. The Big Five's theater
chains were crucial here. Even though they comprised
only about one sixth of the nation's theaters, they
included most of the first-run theaters — that is, the
movie palaces and deluxe downtown theaters that gener-
ated the lion's share of movie revenues, where all top
features were launched. The Big Eight maintained their
market controls through their trade association, the
MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America; later MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of
America), which encouraged cooperation among the stu-
dios while fending off continual threats of government
regulation and the relentless complaints from independ-
ent producers and theater owners. This effort included
the creation in 1934 of the Production Code
Administration, Hollywood's self-censorship office,
which exercised certain constraints over movie content
but defused threats of boycott by the Catholic Legion of
Decency as well as threats of government regulation of
movie content.

The Depression posed a more serious threat, with four
of the Big Eight studios suffering financial collapse. But the
studio system survived, due mainly to the support of Wall
Street as well as the "national recovery" campaign of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), launched
in 1933 when he took office, which effectively sanctioned
the studio's market controls while mandating labor organ-
ization. This ensured cash flow to the studios and trans-
formed the factory system itself from an open shop into a
fully organized operation, with the division of labor now
fully codified. The studios' market controls drew heavier
fire as the Depression eased, however, and eventually the
Justice Department demanded that the studios cease block
booking, blind bidding, and other monopolistic practices.
The studios failed to comply, resulting in US v. Paramount
Pictures et ai, an antitrust suit filed in July 1938. The
resolution of the Supreme Court's legendary Paramount
case changed the very nature and structure of the studio
system.

THE GOLDEN AGE

That resolution was forestalled for a full decade by the
studios' legal departments as well as by World War II,
and in the meantime Hollywood enjoyed enormous crit-
ical and commercial success as the classical era reached a

sustained peak during what is frequently referred to as
Hollywood's "golden age." Essential to that success was
the studio system, which reached full maturity during the
1930s as each of the Big Eight developed a distinctive
house style according to its internal resources, stables of
contract talent, and overall market strategy. Key here
were the studios' trademark star-genre formulas —
Universal's classic horror cycle with Boris Karloff and
Bela Lugosi and its Deanna Durbin musicals, for
instance, or Warner Bros.' gangster sagas with James
Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, its backstage musicals
with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, its swashbuckling
romances with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and
its Bette Davis melodramas. Both companies also turned
out a large proportion of B movies, some of which were
equally formulaic and market-driven, but it was each
studio's A-class star vehicles that defined its signature
style and carried the freight during the classical era,
moving its annual block of pictures through the nation's
theaters.

Teams of top talent invariably formed around these
star-genre formulas, ensuring their consistent quality and
efficient output. The star was the prime component, of
course, and thus the vital interdependence of the star
system and the studio system. But directors, writers,
composers, designers, and others were important to these
units as well, with the producer serving as the adminis-
trative linchpin who oversaw production and managed
relations with the executives in the "front office." The
top executives, in turn, operated in tandem — and often
in significant tension — with the home office in New
York, which was the ultimate arbiter of fiscal policy and
corporate control. But this was scarcely a top-down sys-
tem in terms of creative authority. The New York office
could not produce movies, nor could the studio's pro-
duction executives — with the rare exceptions of truly
creative executives like Darryl F. Zanuck (1902-1979)
(initially at Warner Bros, and later at Fox) or David
O. Selznick (1902-1965) (who was a production execu-
tive at Paramount, RKO, and MGM before launching
Selznick International Pictures in 1936). This creative
conflict and collaboration at all levels of studio operation,
despite the ultimate authority of the owners and top
studio executives, was an essential trait of the studio
system. By the late 1930s, the American film industry
had attained what the astute French critic and theorist
Andre Bazin compared to "the equilibrium profile of a
river," whose waters flow evenly along without disturbing
its banks (Bazin, 1967, p. 31). Bazin and others saw
Hollywood as having entered its classical era — a period
of creative, commercial, industrial, and institutional bal-
ance, whose success was the result of "not only the talent
of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system"
(Bazin, 1968, p. 154).

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Studio System

Aerial view of Warner Bros. Hollywood studios in 1930. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS.

That system went into high gear in the 1940s, when
war-related conditions spurred an unprecedented financial
boom for the movie industry — particularly for the inte-
grated majors. During the war, the Justice Department
suspended its antitrust campaign "for the duration." The
US conversion to war production brought people to the
major cities and put money in their pockets but severely
limited their capacity to spend it (due to rationing and the
dearth of goods due to the general focus on "war produc-
tion"). Movies provided a prime source of entertainment
and diversion, particularly in major cities where the Big
Five's theater chains were concentrated and the impact of
the war economy was most pronounced. The major studios
responded to the overheated first-run market by focusing
on A-class pictures and cutting back on B-movie produc-
tion, and by focusing film content on the war itself, at
Washington's insistence, turning out newsreels and docu-
mentaries in unprecedented numbers, most of them war-
related, as were roughly one quarter of all features films.

Although the movie industry did record business
during the war and appeared to be as strong as ever, the
studio system was beginning to weaken. Some of these
various factors were war related, particularly changes to
the tax codes (to underwrite the defense buildup) that
put top talent in the 70-90 percent tax brackets, thus
encouraging high-salaried stars, directors, and producers
to "go freelance" by creating independent companies,
which enabled them to be taxed at the far lower capital
gains rate. The first-run market surge and unprecedented
premium on A-class pictures also put a huge premium on
top talent, giving them the leverage to demand more
independence from the studios and greater creative
control over their films. Olivia de Havilland (b. 1916)
successfully challenged the studios' suspension policies in
the courts, severely undercutting the contract system that
kept top talent tied to particular studios.

The challenges to the studio system intensified enor-
mously after the war. Hollywood enjoyed its best year

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Studio System

ever in terms of attendance and profits in 1946, as
returning veterans and heavy courtship sustained the
war boom, but in 1947 the movie industry's fortunes
began to turn. In 1948, Hollywood went into an eco-
nomic free fall that would continue for the next quarter
century, resulting from the combined effects of suburban
migration and the rapid emergence of commercial tele-
vision. The crippling blow to the studio system was the
Supreme Court's May 1948 Paramount decision, which
demanded that the Big Five divest their theater chains
and that all eight producer-distributors suspend the trade
practices (block booking, blind booking) that had
enabled them to control the motion picture marketplace.

THE TELEVISION ERA AND
THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

Falling attendance and the Paramount decision effectively
disintegrated the studio system, depriving the studios of
the economic controls that ensured regular revenues, paid
the studio overhead, and thereby rationalized their fac-
tory-based operations. The major studios survived by
effectively overhauling the system itself, fundamentally
changing the ways they did business and establishing
practices (still in use today) that dramatically reduced
their controls of production and exhibition, and that
reduced their out as well. This brought an end to the
system of mass production that had dominated the movie
industry for decades, but it was an eminently sound
strategy, because the mass consumption of screen enter-
tainment in the United States rapidly shifted from going
to the movies to watching TV. Essential to the studios'
survival was their collective control of distribution, the
one aspect of their monopolistic operations not affected
by the Paramount decision, and their willingness to share
control of filmmaking with independent producers, top
talent, and talent agencies. Simply stated, the studios
became primarily financing-and-distribution entities,
reviewing projects that were developed and packaged by
the growing ranks of independent producers, then in the
event of a green light, leasing their production facilities
and providing a portion of the production cost in
exchange for the distribution rights — and, frequently,
for the eventual ownership of the completed film. The
studios themselves began producing fewer, "big" pic-
tures — biblical epics and big-screen westerns — during
the 1950s, precursors of the blockbusters that now rule
the industry. The studios shared control of film produc-
tion not only with independent producers and freelance
directors, but also top stars whose marquee value gave
them tremendous leverage. And because most filmmak-
ing talent operated freelance by the 1950s, talent agencies
like William Morris and MCA (Music Corporation of

America) also became a major force in postwar film (and
television) production.

The major studios initially resisted but soon came to
terms with television in the 1950s, selling or leasing their
older films to TV syndication companies while revamp-
ing their factory-based production operations for "tele-
film" series production. By the 1960s, movies were
running nightly on prime time television and the studios
were turning out far more hours of telefilm series than
feature films. Meanwhile, movie attendance continued to
erode, despite rapid population growth, and the studios
gambled on high-stakes blockbusters like Cleopatra
(1963) and The Sound of Music (1965) but relied pri-
marily on television to pay the bills. Studio fortunes by
the late 1960s were at an all-time low, rendering them
prime acquisition targets, and many were swallowed up
by large conglomerates like Gulf + Western (Paramount),
Transamerica (United Artists), and Kinney Services
(Warner Bros.), as well as real estate tycoon Kirk
Kerkorian (MGM). The MCA-Universal merger in
1962 was the first and by far the most successful alliance
at the time, due to its savvy integration of film and
television operations and its maintenance of at least a
semblance of the old studio-based mode of production.

Universal also spurred the movie industry's recovery
with the phenomenal success of Jaws, a 1975 release that
spawned a new breed of blockbusters like Star Wars
(1977), Grease (1978), and Superman (1978), summer
releases launched via nationwide marketing and satura-
tion release campaigns that resulted in record box-office
revenue and were the dominant, defining products of the
emergent "New Hollywood." The success of this block-
buster syndrome reinforced an economic recovery in the
industry that continues today, and it enabled the studios
to regain some of their lost authority as well, as they
became increasingly adept at transforming blockbuster
hits into entertainment franchises — multimedia product
lines comprised of movie sequels, TV spinoffs, video
games, theme-park rides, soundtrack albums, music vid-
eos, and an endless array of licensed merchandise.
Hollywood's recovery accelerated during the 1980s,
fueled by a range of factors that complemented the
studios' burgeoning blockbuster mentality. One factor
was the rapid growth of new media technologies and
new delivery systems, most notably home video and
pay-cable television (i.e., subscription "movie channels"
like HBO), which proved to be as hit driven as the box
office. Foreign markets were equally receptive to
Hollywood blockbusters, and thus the studios' interna-
tional distribution operations grew steadily during the
1980s, going into high gear in the 1990s, when the fall
of the Soviet Union and the concurrent economic
reforms in China created a truly global market for
Hollywood films.

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Studio System

Twentieth Century Fox's The Sound of Music (Robert Wise) was a successful blockbuster in 1965- ® ™ AND COPYRIGHT ©
20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Another crucial factor in Hollywood's continued
recovery was Reagan-era economic and (de) regulatory
policies, which generated a merger-and-acquisition wave
that propelled the rise of global media conglomerates and
fundamentally transformed the nature and role of the
studio powers. The process began with News Corp.'s
purchase of Twentieth Century Fox in 1985 and the
launch of Fox Broadcasting (a fourth US television net-
work) in 1986, and it accelerated in 1989 and 1990 with
Sony's acquisition of Columbia, Matsushita's buyout of
MCA-Universal, and the Time- Warner merger. This
trend continued into the 1990s, highlighted by
Viacom's purchase of Paramount Communications (for-
merly Gulf + Western) and Blockbuster Video, the Walt
Disney Company's acquisition of "indie" giant Miramax
and the ABC TV network, and Time Warner's purchase

of Turner Broadcasting (with its myriad cable holdings,
massive film and TV library, indie film subsidiaries,
sports franchises, and theme-park operations).

In the wake of the Disney-ABC deal in August 1995,
Neal Gabler, one of Hollywood's more astute observers,
posited that this and other deals "mark[s] a fundamental
shift in the balance of power in Hollywood — really the
third revolution in the relationship between industry
forces." Revolution I, he said, occurred nearly a century
before, when the Hollywood studios first emerged and,
in a heady churn of competition and collusion, created a
system that enabled them to utterly control the movie
industry for decades. Revolution II came with the post-
war rise of television and the dismantling of the studio
system by the courts. As the twentieth century drew to
a close, deregulation, globalization, and new media

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175

Studio System

technologies were ushering in Revolution III. "By com-
bining movies, broadcast television, video, foreign video,
foreign television, merchandizing, theme parks, sound-
track albums, books and heaven knows what else,
[Disney CEO Michael] Eisner has devised a new form
of vertical integration," wrote Gabler, whose bottom-line
assessment was rather simple: "The studios are back in
power" (p. 15).

Gabler proved to be quite correct in terms of the
latest media revolution and the return to vertical integra-
tion, but altogether wrong about the studios, which wield
nowhere near the power that they did during the classical
era. The conglomerate trend would continue with Time
Warner's ill-fated merger with AOL, Viacom's purchase
of CBS, General Electric's purchase of NBC and
Universal, and countless other deals, all of which under-
score the fact that power now resides not with the studios
but with their parent companies, for whom "filmed
entertainment" represents merely one of many entertain-
ment divisions, along with publishing, music, television,
theme parks, and the rest. The studios enjoy a privileged
position in global entertainment's great chain of being
because Hollywood-produced blockbusters are veritable
launch vehicles for multimedia (and potentially multi-
billion-dollar) entertainment franchises, and thus the key
holding for any media conglomerate is a Hollywood
studio. Moreover, these blockbuster films and the media
franchises they spawn bring a certain logic and coherence
to the parent company's far-flung operations and its
diversified media divisions, creating a system of sorts in
the global entertainment industry. But this is a far cry
from the studio system of old, wherein the Hollywood
studios themselves controlled all phases of the industry,
when their chief concerns were the quality and currency
of their films for a vast movie-going public and the
capacity to supply (and control) the US movie market.

SEE ALSO B Movies; Columbia; Distribution; Exhibition;
Independent Film; MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer);
Merchandising; Paramount; Production Process; RKO

Radio Pictures; Star System; Television; Twentieth
Century Fox; United Artists; Universal; Warner Bros.

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the
Tifiies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Balio, Tino, ed. The American Tilm Industry. Revised edition.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
, ed. Hollywood in the Age of Television. Boston: Unwin

Hyman, 1990.

Bazin, Andre. "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," In
What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, edited and translated by Hugh Gray,
23-40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

. "La politiques des auteurs." In The New Wave, edited by

Peter Praham. London: Secer & Warburg, 1968.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.

Finler, Joel W. The Hollywood Story. New York: Crown
Publishers, 1988.

Gabler, Neal. "Revenge of the Studio System." New York Times,
22 August 1995, Section A, 15.

Gomery, Douglas. The Hollywood Studio System. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1986.

Litman, Barry R. The Motion Picture Mega-Industry. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon, 1998.

Mordden, Ethan. The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the
Golden Age of Movies. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking
in the Studio Era. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996.

. "The New Hollywood." In Film Theory Goes to the

Movies, edited by Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava
Preacher Collins, 8-36. New York: Routledge, 1993.

. "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System." In

Conglomerates and the Media, edited by Patricia Aufderheide,
et al, 73-106. New York: New Press, 1997.

Wasko, Janet. Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver
Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Thomas Schatz

176

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SUPPORTING ACTORS

The category of supporting actor includes all actors who
play secondary, supporting roles in films. These roles can
be played by actors who also appear in leading roles in
other films, or by character actors. Character actors typ-
ically play similar roles from film to film, and very
frequently have a distinctive look, voice or manner which
precludes them from playing leading roles in most main-
stream films. George Clooney is an example of an actor
who has played both leading roles (Ocean's Eleven, 2001)
and supporting roles (Syriana, 2005). A more traditional
character actor is Peter Lorre, who played similar sup-
porting roles in films such as Casablanca (1942) and The
Maltese Falcon (1941). While character actors frequently
play supporting roles in films, they also occasionally play
leading roles, such as Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude
(1971) and Peter Dinklage in The Station Agent (2003).

The system of leading and supporting actors used in
American cinema is also found in other countries, where
supporting actors serve the same function as they do in
the United States. Great Britain's Dame Maggie Smith
{Gosford Park, 2001), Spain's Juan Diego (El Septimo
Dta, 2004) and France's Jean Carmet (Les Miserables,
1982), are examples of actors who have earned critical
praise and numerous awards and nominations for sup-
porting performances in their native countries.

BACKGROUND

Supporting roles were an essential element in the theater
long before the movies were invented, and they served
much the same function that they would come to serve in
motion pictures. Supporting actors were unnecessary in
the earliest movies: short documentaries, called actualites,

featured images from real life and therefore did not use
actors at all, and others were short, staged scenes that
featured only a very small number of performers. By the
early twentieth century, film narratives became more
complex and started featuring a hierarchy of characters
similar to what had previously existed in the theater, with
some roles playing a more prominent part in the plot's
development than others. As movies grew longer and
their narratives more elaborate, supporting roles were
needed to flesh out the stories. Once Hollywood's star
system began to take shape around 1910, the use of
supporting players became more pronounced, with one
or two stars taking the major roles in each film and an
array of character and supporting actors handling the
remaining, smaller roles.

Although supporting actors had appeared in movies
since very early on, the category of Supporting Actor was
not officially recognized by the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences until 1937, eight years after
the Academy began giving out their annual awards. The
inclusion of supporting actors in the Academy Awards®
was initially a way for the Academy to appease the
members of the actors' union, the Screen Actors Guild,
formed in 1933 as a response to studio business practices
that actors felt were unfair, including cuts to and limits
on actors' and writers' salaries, and a tightening of studio
control of actors under contract. When the Academy
sided with the studios in this dispute, the Screen Actors
Guild denounced the organization and required its mem-
bers to resign from the Academy. In 1936 the Screen
Actors Guild, along with the Writers Guild and the
newly formed Directors Guild, sent telegrams to its
members encouraging them to boycott that year's awards

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177

Supporting Actors

Walter Brennan (right) won the first Academy Award® for
Best Supporting Actor in Come and Get It (Howard
Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1936). EVERETT COLLECTION.

REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

ceremony. The following year, in an effort to placate the
actors and increase their interest in the awards, the
Academy added the categories of Best Actor and Actress
in a Supporting Role. That same year the Academy
increased the number of acting nominees in each cate-
gory from three to five. The first year the supporting
acting winners received plaques instead of statuettes, but
in the following years they received the same statuettes as
the other award winners. The winners of the first sup-
porting actor and actress awards were Walter Brennan
(1894-1974) for Come and Get It (1936) and Gale
Sondergaard (1899-1985) for Anthony Adverse (1936).

THE SUPPORTING CHARACTER

Compared to leading roles, supporting roles frequently
provide more opportunities for "nontraditional"
actors — actors who fall outside the narrow boundaries
of age, race, and appearance that have long defined lead-
ing roles in Hollywood. Although leading roles have
historically tended to be played by actors who are young,
white, and conventionally attractive, supporting roles
have been filled by a vast spectrum of performers who

do not necessarily fit the "look" of a typical Hollywood
star.

In some films the leading characters are played by
elderly actors, but the vast majority of movies feature
leads in their twenties and thirties. Many older actors
who play supporting roles were leading actors earlier in
their careers and have made the transition to smaller
roles, often because of the scarcity of leading roles for
actors past a certain age. Alan Alda played leading roles in
the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1990s and 2000s has
primarily played supporting roles in films such as Flirting
with Disaster (1996) and The Aviator (2004), for which
he was nominated for an Academy Award®. Meryl
Streep's career has followed a similar trajectory; she
appeared almost exclusively in leading roles throughout
the 1980s, and though she still occasionally plays the
lead, she appears with increasing frequency in supporting
roles, such as in The Hours (2002), Adaptation (2002),
and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
(2004). Although older supporting actors are often cast
in pedestrian roles as parents or grandparents, they are
sometimes given the chance to play more challenging and
showy roles. In Rosemary's Baby (1968) Ruth Gordon
gives a memorable performance as Minnie Castevet, the
brash and flamboyant neighbor to Mia Farrow's
Rosemary. The difference between the characters played
by Gordon, the character actor, and Farrow, the ingenue,
is striking. Whereas Farrow is constricted by the audien-
ce's expectations for leading ladies and the conventions of
the genre, which dictate how she should behave in certain
situations, Gordon has more freedom to create her own
character. Similarly, Thelma Ritter (1905-1969), who
was forty-two when she made her film debut in Miracle
on 34th Street (1947), exhibited a gloomy humor in her
films, commenting wryly on the action and bluntly stat-
ing truths that the leading characters refused to acknowl-
edge. Her age and her status as a supporting player made
her characterizations possible; the leading ladies she
played opposite, such as Grace Kelly in Rear Window
(1954) and Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959), would
never have gotten away with Ritter's brand of acerbic wit.

Just as older actors have found a great many support-
ing roles available to them, so have child actors. Children
have appeared in supporting roles in countless films, and
many have received critical and public acclaim. At the age
of ten, Tatum O'Neal won the Best Supporting Actress
award for her work in Paper Moon (1973), becoming the
youngest person to win an Academy Award®. Other
notable supporting performances by child actors include
Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! (1968), Mary
Badham as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Anna
Paquin in The Piano (1993), and Haley Joel Osment in
The Sixth Sense (1999). Children, like adults, can give a
wide range of performances in supporting roles, from

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THELMA RITTER

b. Brooklyn, New York, 14 February 1905, d. 5 February 1969

Over the course of her career as one of the most popular
supporting actresses in motion pictures, Thelma Ritter was
nominated for a total of six Academy Awards® but never
won, making her one of the most nominated actors in any
category never to win an Oscar®. She appeared in movies,
television, radio, and theater, in a career that spanned close
to sixty years. With her trademark gravel voice and bleak
expression, Ritter was best known for playing world-weary
characters who could steal a scene with a blunt wisecrack
or witty retort.

Rittter attended the American Academy of Dramatic
Arts and then spent the next several years performing in
stock companies around New York, with occasional stints
in vaudeville and on Broadway. While performing in stock
she played a wide variety of roles, both supporting and
lead. In her later film career, her versatility enabled her to
play many different types of roles as well as to shift easily
between drama and comedy. In 1946 the director George
Seaton, an old family friend, asked her to play a cameo bit
in his film Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Ritter's
performance as a weary shopper whose young son drags
her to Macy's to visit Santa Claus so impressed studio
head Daryl Zanuck that he ordered additional scenes for
her and signed her to an exclusive contract.

Entering motion pictures at the age of forty-two,
Ritter's age combined with her somewhat frumpy
appearance and Brooklyn accent destined her for

supporting rather than leading roles. She was often cast
as a working woman, usually a maid or secretary whose
wry, offhand remarks cut to the heart of the situation.
As Stella, the cynical nurse in Rear Window (1954),
and as Alma, the perpetually hungover maid in Pillow
Talk (1959), she is engagingly straightforward and
unflappable. Ritter's performance in Pickup on South
Street (1953) as Moe, the weary yet opportunistic street
vendor, alternates between comedy and pathos and is
one of the best of her career. For this performance
Ritter earned her fourth consecutive Academy Award®
nomination. Her other nominations were for All About
Eve (1950), The Mating Season (1951), With a Song in
My Heart (1952), Pillow Talk, and, in a dramatic
performance as the long-suffering mother to Burt
Lancaster's title character, Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Miracle on 34th Street (1947), A Letter to Three Wives (1949),
All About Eve (1950), The Mating Season (1951), Pickup
on South Street (1953), Rear Window (1954), Pillow Talk
(1959), The Misfits (1961), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962),
Boeing Boeing (1965)

FURTHER READING

Parish, James Robert. Good Dames. New York: A. S. Barnes
and Company, 1974.

Kristen Anderson Wagner

sweet and endearing (Drew Barrymore in E. T. The Extra-
Terrestrial, 1982), to demonic (Linda Blair in The
Exorcist, 1973).

Throughout Hollywood history leading performers
in films have overwhelmingly been white. This was espe-
cially true during Hollywood's classical era, when studio
films featuring nonwhite performers in starring roles were
almost unheard of. Supporting roles have been offered to
actors of color with a much higher frequency than have
leading roles, and these performances are marked with
the versatility and artistry commonly found in supporting
performances. The African American actress Hattie
McDaniel (1895-1952) won a Supporting Actress
Academy Award® for her 1939 performance as
Mammy in Gone with the Wind, making her the first

nonwhite actor to be nominated for, or win, an acting
Oscar®. Despite this recognition of her talents,
McDaniel spent the bulk of her career playing cooks
and maids for white leading ladies such as Margaret
Sullavan {The Shopworn Angel, 1938), Barbara
Stanwyck {The Mad Miss Manton, 1938), and Ann
Sheridan {George Washington Slept Here, 1942). Dooley
Wilson, who won acclaim for his role as Sam, the piano
player, in Casablanca (1942), also had a difficult time
finding supporting roles of substance; like McDaniel, he
frequently appeared as a servant in films such as Higher
and Higher (1943), in which he played a chauffeur, and
My Favorite Blonde (1942), in which he played a railway
porter. Over the years, the caliber of supporting roles
played by African Americans has increased tremendously,

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Thelma Ritter with Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953). * ™ AND COPYRIGHT © 20TH CENTURY FOX
FILM CORP./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

allowing these actors to showcase their talents by playing
a wide range of characters. In Pinky (1949) Ethel Waters
turned in a moving performance as the title character's
strong-willed grandmother; Whoopi Goldberg won an
Academy Award® for her supporting performance as a
flighty psychic in Ghost (1990); and in The Crying Game
(1992), Jaye Davidson played an English transvestite in
love with an IRA soldier. These vastly divergent roles
demonstrate the range of characters played by African
American supporting actors.

Like African American performers, other minority
actors have found success in supporting roles when lead-
ing roles were unavailable to them. The Japanese-
American actor Sessue Hayakawa (1889-1973) delivered
a powerful performance as the inflexible head of a
Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in The Bridge on the
River Kwai (1957), and Rita Moreno's turn as the spir-
ited Puerto Rican immigrant Anita in West Side Story

(1961) earned her critical acclaim and an Academy
Award®. Nonwhite actors have increasingly filled roles
of complexity and substance. The Iranian-American
actress Shohreh Aghdashloo gave a riveting performance
as the wife and mother of a family torn apart by tragic
circumstances in House of Sand and Fog (2003). Sandra
Oh, a Canadian actress of Korean descent, played a
comedic role as a free-spirited wine lover in Sideways
(2004). Puerto Rican-born actor Benicio Del Toro has
had memorable supporting roles in a number of fdms,
among them The Usual Suspects (1995), Traffic (2000),
and 21 Grams (2003). Although a substantial discrepancy
between the numbers of leading roles available to white
and nonwhite actors persists, the freedom and creativity
available in supporting roles is evident in the perform-
ances of countless minority actors.

The overwhelming majority of leading actors in
Hollywood films are conventionally attractive, but the

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same standards do not apply to supporting actors. Actors
who fit specific character "types" due to their weight,
height, or appearance can find work in supporting roles.
Marty Feldman, whose gaunt face and bulging eyes pro-
hibited him from working as a leading man, played a
number of memorable supporting roles, such as in The
Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975) and
in Young Frankenstein (1974), as Igor, the hunchbacked
laboratory assistant. Like Feldman, the talented come-
dian Mary Wickes was not considered conventionally
attractive enough by the studios to play leading roles
but found success and longevity as a character actress in
films such as The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) and
Sister Act (1992). Other actors who do not fit
Hollywood's conception of what a leading actor should
look like have had similarly successful careers as support-
ing and character actors, including world-weary but
tough-as-nails Ritter, rough-edged William Demarest,
and three-foot-nine-inch Billy Barry.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUPPORTING ACTORS

Actors who specialize in supporting roles sometimes
describe their work as similar to performing in a stock
theater company, for which actors fill multiple roles in a
variety of plays over the course of a single season.
Similarly, an actor who plays supporting roles will fre-
quently be asked to perform a wide assortment of types.
Versatility is a key element in the career of many sup-
porting players. Frances McDormand, for example,
played two very different supporting roles in the films
Raising Arizona (1987) and Mississippi Burning (1988).
In the former, she does a comedic turn as a wildly
enthusiastic mother of a small army of children; in the
latter, she has a dramatic role as the abused wife of a
small-town sheriff in 1964 Mississippi. Similarly, Samuel
L. Jackson's supporting roles as a strung-out crack addict
in Jungle Fever (1991) and a self-assured, cool-as-ice hit
man in Pulp Fiction (1994) allowed him to showcase his
versatility as an actor and paved the way for lead actor
roles in subsequent films.

Some supporting actors, especially those who spe-
cialize in character parts, play the same sort of role from
one film to the next. These actors are usually cast as a
particular type and play it often enough that audiences
know what to expect as soon as they see the actor in a
film. Eve Arden, for example, made a career of playing
wisecracking, independent women in films such as
Mildred Pierce (1945) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959),
and Henry Travers appeared in numerous films playing a
kindly old man with a twinkle in his eye, as in The Bells
of St. Mary's (1945) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Appearing in supporting roles gives actors other
advantages as well. Because they are not the stars of the
films, supporting actors are not held responsible by the
studio for a film's failure. Also, supporting actors can
appear in more films in the course of a year than can
leading actors because the amount of time they need to
commit for filming is often significantly less. Supporting
roles can be liberating for actors, because they are often
allowed more latitude in terms of characterization. Agnes
Moorehead, who played supporting roles in The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), All That Heaven Allows
(1955), Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and
numerous other films, described the freedom enjoyed
by supporting actors: "in each individual role the char-
acter actor is rarely limited in the amount of character-
ization he can invent. He is like a painter with a very
large palette of colors from which to paint an interesting
picture with dimension. It can be a subtle performance or
an eccentric one" (quoted in Steen, p. 104).

Supporting actors are frequently called on to provide
comic relief. These comic roles often occur in otherwise
serious films to diffuse tension and provide the audience
with a small break in the drama. Some actors, like Arden,
Ritter, and Donald O'Connor, made careers out of play-
ing comic seconds; others, including Moorehead and
George Sanders, alternated between comic and dramatic
supporting roles. A notable early example of a comic
supporting role occurred in D.W. Griffith's epic
Intolerance (1916). Constance Talmadge played a feisty
mountain girl in the Babylonian sequences, providing
light moments in this otherwise heavily dramatic film.
Critics and audiences took note of her small part, pro-
pelling her to stardom as a leading comic actress of the
silent era. Russ Tamblyn's performance as Riff in West
Side Story serves a similar purpose; his comic songs and
dancing allow the audience to enjoy a few laughs in the
midst of the tragic story.

The wisecracking best friend who delivers witty
remarks and wry observations is a supporting role found
in countless films of all genres. Among many examples
are Arden in Mildred Pierce, Barbara Bel Geddes in
Vertigo (1958), Ritter in The Misfits (1961), and
Patricia Clarkson in Far from Heaven (2002). These
characters act as confidantes of the film's leading lady
or man. Because the demands of narrative and conven-
tion exert less pressure on supporting actors, they are
freer to experiment and test boundaries. The characters
played by Arden, Bel Geddes, and Ritter are single and
remain so throughout the film, enjoying an integrity of
independence unavailable to the leading characters, who
are expected to fulfill romantic expectations. While the
leading characters must, as a rule, be sympathetic to the
audience, the comic supporting characters can be blunt
and abrasive. In A Patch of Blue (1965), Shelley Winters
plays the abusive and bigoted mother of a blind daughter.

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Supporting Actors

Winters, who won an Academy Award® for her perform-
ance in this film, is thoroughly convincing in creating an
intensely unlikable character. Lee Ermey's drill sergeant
in Full Metal Jacket (1987) is another character whose
insulting and abrasive manner makes him entirely
unsympathetic to the audience. Unlikable supporting
characters can help create conflict in the plot, providing
a counterpoint to the leading actors who serve as the
films' heroes. In the more restrictive classical era, comic
supporting characters could also enjoy some harmless
amorality with impunity: they could drink, smoke, and
chase after the opposite sex, behaviors generally denied to
the leading characters.

Whereas leading actors generally need to keep their
performances grounded in reality to make the film
believable, supporting actors have more freedom to be
excessive. In his portrayal of the silent film actor Max
Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Willem
Dafoe's appearance and mannerisms are so grotesque that
his character is at once fascinating and repulsive. In
Cabaret (1972) Joel Gray is by turns flamboyant and
intense as the Master of Ceremonies of a nightclub in
pre- World War II Germany. In comedies, supporting
actors are often more outrageously funny than the leads.
Both Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor deliver broad
comedic performances in Singin' in the Rain (1952),
Hagen as the silent film star whose shrill voice is poorly
suited to talking pictures, and O'Connor as the leading
man's best friend, who wins the most laughs with his
almost impossibly flexible dances, pratfalls, and facial
expressions. In Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Jennifer
Tilly goes for a broad performance as a squeaky-voiced
gangster's moll, and Dianne Wiest brings a touch of the
absurd to the role of an aging actress. In both films the
leading performances are much more restrained than the
supporting roles.

The types of roles offered to supporting actors can
often showcase their talents and lead to increased expo-
sure and acclaim. Supporting actors who make bold
choices, or find ways to stand out in their roles, can find
themselves playing leading roles in later films. Because
supporting roles frequently go to actors who are just
starting out in the movies, there is tremendous potential
for previously unknown actors to earn fame though their
supporting performances. Kevin Spacey's performance in
The Usual Suspects (1995) as the nervous con man Verbal
Kint generated such attention that since then Spacey has
primarily appeared in starring roles. Countless other
actors primarily known as leading players began their
career in supporting roles, including Cary Grant {She
Done Him Wrong, 1933), Jean Harlow (Dinner at
Eight, 1933), James Stewart (After the Thin Man,
1936), Glenn Close (The World According to Garp,
1982), and Denzel Washington (Glory 1989). Jodie

Foster, who began as a child actor playing supporting
roles in films such as Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
(1974) and Taxi Driver (1976), went on to become a
leading player as an adult, earning Best Actress Academy
Awards® for her roles in The Accused (1988) and The
Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Occasionally, supporting roles are played by per-
formers who are known for their work in other fields,
and as such are new to acting. The baseball player Babe
Ruth played himself in supporting roles in a number of
films, most notably The Pride of the Yankees (1942).
Musicians often appear in supporting roles in films,
sometimes as musical performers — for example, Queen
Latifah in Chicago (2002) — but sometimes in roles hav-
ing nothing to do with music — Madonna in Desperately
Seeking Susan (1985) and Frank Sinatra's Oscar® -win-
ning turn in From Here to Eternity (1953). Other neo-
phyte actors have appeared in supporting roles under a
variety of circumstances. Harold Russell was cast in The
Best Years of Our Lives (1946) as a returning soldier who
had lost both of his hands in the war because he had, in
fact, lost both of his hands in the war. Russell was
awarded two Oscars® for his work in the film, one for
his supporting performance, and a second special award
for "bringing hope and courage" to other veterans.

SEE ALSO Acting; Casting; Character Actors; Star System;
Stars; Studio System

FURTHER READING

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.

deCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the
Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2001.

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London:

Macmillan, 1987.
. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

McClure, Arthur F., Alfred E. Twomey, and Ken D. Jones. More
Character People. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1984.

Roof, Judith. All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third
Wheels. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Steen, Mike. "The Character Player: Agnes Moorehead."
Hollywood Speaks: An Oral History, 103-117. New York:
Putnam, 1974.

Wiley, Mason, and Damien Bona. Inside Oscar 9 : The Unofficial
History of the Academy Awards® . New York: Ballantine Books,
1996.

Zucker, Carole, ed. Making Visible the Invisible: An Anthology of
Original Essays on Film Acting. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 1990.

Kristen Anderson Wagner

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SURREALISM

Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement in Paris
from 1924 to 1941, consisting of a small group of
writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Andre Breton
(1896-1966), Salvador Dali (1904-1989), and Luis
Bunuel (1900-1983). The movement used shocking,
irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream sym-
bolism to challenge the traditional function of art to
represent reality. Surrealism in film was limited to a small
number of films, and the movement ended when it failed
to remain shocking to audiences. Yet surrealism's aes-
thetic and creative principles remain influential to a
number of international artists and filmmakers.

DADAIST ROOTS

The roots of surrealism begin with the dada movement.
Dada was founded in 1915 in Zurich, Switzerland, by an
international group of pacifist intellectuals and artists
who fled to the neutral country in protest of World
War I. This group felt that humanity's megalomania
and industrial capitalism were the principle causes of
the war, so they considered dada to be a "moral revolu-
tion." In the process of creating dada art, the artist held
no special significance; he or she was merely the vessel
through which the art emerged. The creative process
became a work of automation, relying on chance to relay
the voice of the unconscious. The dadaists felt that by
allowing these random and impersonal forces to drive the
creative process, art became a "cry from the bowels." The
dada goal was to cast doubt on the power of language,
literature, and art to represent reality, which they felt was
absurdly chaotic and unrepresentable. They reveled in
what they called the "anti-real." Dadaists saw art as a
pretentious luxury, so they set out to change the context

in which art was to be experienced. Marcel Duchamp
(1887-1968) abandoned painting in 1913 and instead
began selecting what he called "readymades," everyday
objects with seemingly no artistic value. Duchamp's most
notorious readymade was Fountain, simply a urinal
tipped on its side. Dada artists created stream-of-con-
sciousness poetry, photomontage art, found-object sculp-
tures, and raucous improvisational theater meant to anger
audiences and shock them into questioning reason, taste,
and the place of art in contemporary society. Often
during a dada performance or gallery showing, the audi-
ence would be so incensed that a riot would break out,
much to the delight of the performers.

Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) quickly took a position
as head of the movement, publishing his Dada Manifesto
in 1918. Under his leadership, dada flourished on nihil-
ism, chaos, unseriousness, and a dark sense of humor.
After World War I, Tzara introduced dada to the intel-
lectuals of Paris in 1919. Soon after its initial shock, Paris
began to accept dada — even embrace it. The movement,
no longer fulfilling its goal of creating anxiety and chaos
in society, began to disband. Conflicts developed
between Tzara and Breton, who had begun investigating
Sigmund Freud's research into the unconscious and
wanted to bring his theories into the creative process of
dada. Tzara saw psychoanalysis as an instrument of mys-
tification and bourgeois ideals, which he felt to be coun-
ter to the dada anti-real; Breton felt that Tzara's lack of
seriousness was the cause for dada's approaching self-
destruction, and he wanted to reorganize and reinvigorate
the movement. He incorporated his interest in Freud
with the automatic processes of dada art, resulting in
the new movement of surrealism.

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Surrealism

By 1922, dada was dead. While many dadaists
considered Breton to be a traitor to dada, others made
the transition directly into surrealism. After a brief
period of what was termed "le mouvement flou,"(the
fuzzy movement) in which the surrealists defined the
movement by reference to the discarded dada, Breton
(known as the Pope of Surrealism) published the first
Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. It was surrealism's
declaration of the rights of man through the liberation
of the unconscious. The goal of surrealism was to
synthesize dream and reality so that the resulting art
challenged the limits of representation and perception.
Surrealism abandoned the dada goal of art as a direct
transmitter of thought and focused instead on express-
ing the rupture and duality of language through
imagery.

The surrealist image could be either verbal or picto-
rial and had a twofold function. First, images that seem
incompatible with each other should be juxtaposed
together in order to create startling analogies that disrupt
passive audience enjoyment and conventional expecta-
tions of art. This technique was perhaps an influence of
Soviet montage theory, with which the surrealists were
familiar. Second, the image must mark the beginning of
an exploration into the unknown rather than merely
representing a thing of beauty. The surrealist experience
of beauty instead involved a psychic disturbance, a "con-
vulsive beauty" generated by the startling images and the
analogies they create in the mind of the viewer. The
surrealist painter Salvador Dali used the technique of
photographic realism in order to discredit the world of
reality. By depicting dream objects (melting clocks, for
example) in everyday surroundings, he blurred the line
between reality and fantasy. His paintings relied heavily
on Freudian imagery. Painter Rene Magritte (1898—
1967) interrogated familiar objects (hats, apples, pipes)
by separating them from their meaning in language and
presenting them as absurd riddles.

SURREALIST CINEMA

After World War I, France looked toward avant-garde
cinema to make its mark against Hollywood.
Impressionism, which focused on psychological realism,
naturalism, and symbolism, became the dominant
French film movement. The surrealists, many of whom
were avid film spectators, despised impressionism, but
they admired lowbrow American serials and slapstick
comedies. Breton and his fellow surrealists found the
modernism of Hollywood cinema an exciting medium
in its infancy, unencumbered by a conscious artistic
tradition.

Though dada rejected cinema as a medium of
impressionism, a few dada artists experimented with

filmmaking. The Rhythmus films (1921, 1923, 1925) of
Hans Richter (1888-1976) and Symphonie diagonale
{Symphonie diaganale, 1924) of Viking Eggeling (1880-
1925) attempted to establish a universal pictorial lan-
guage using abstract geometric shapes in rhythmic move-
ment. Duchamp produced Anemic cinema {Anemic
Cinema, 1926), in which he filmed a spinning spiral
design intercut with a spinning disc containing French
phrases. Man Ray (1890-1976) filmed Le Retour a la
raison {Return to Reason, 1923) using an avant-garde
photography technique he pioneered and named the
"myograph." Though cubist artist Fernand Leger
(1881-1955) and filmmaker Dudley Murphy (1897-
1968) were not members of dada, their collaborative
abstract film Ballet mecanique (1924) is often discussed
in relation to these films because of its similar visual style
and Leger's aim to exasperate viewers. Richter's
Vormittagsspuk {Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1928) merged
slapstick and dada to create a highly entertaining six-
minute film.

Although Breton never mentioned film in any of his
manifestos, cinema's visual nature and the dreamlike
experience of watching film led the surrealists to consider
cinema the ideal medium for carrying out their theories
in practice. Between 1924 and 1935, surrealist Antonin
Artaud (1896-1948) was the only surrealist writer to
produce a body of theoretical work about the potential
of the medium, which he called "raw cinema." His aim
was to discover the mechanisms of dreams in order to
reconstitute the violent power of dreaming as a process,
overruling interpretation or explanation. He formulated
the tearing away of image from representation and giving
it to the viewer as a pure image. Spectators are then in a
subjugated position to it, and the experience triggers a
violent unleashing of their senses. Yet Artaud faced much
trouble trying to turn his theories into actual films,
impressionist filmmaker Germaine Dulac directed
Artaud's only completed screenplay, La Coquille et le
clergyman {The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928), which
Artaud rejected as a distortion of his theories on
surrealism.

Man Ray attempted several surrealist films, includ-
ing Emak-Bakia (1926) and LEtoile de mer {The Starfish,
1928), but they failed to excite the surrealists, who con-
sidered them too dadaist. Two months after Breton had
published the first Manifesto of Surrealism, dada artist
Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and filmmaker Rene Clair
presented their film, Entr'acte (1924), during the inter-
mission of a ballet performance. Among a number of
unrelated images, the film features Duchamp and Man
Ray playing chess, and although it is considered to be
surrealist, Picabia meant for it to be a personal attack on
Breton.

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GERMAINE DULAC
b. Amiens, France, 17 November 1882, d. 20 July 1942

A director, writer, and film theorist, Germaine Dulac was
the first female avant-garde filmmaker in France. She was
never an official member of the surrealist movement, but
her theory of "pure cinema" shared similar goals and
ideals to those of surrealism. Though many of Dulac's
films were highly successful commercial narratives (serials
and melodramas), her best moments evoked emotion
without resorting to dramatic devices. Her skill of tapping
into the unconscious processes of her characters and her
viewers' perceptions linked her thematically to the
surrealists.

Dulac's goal of "pure cinema" centered on producing
films that were independent of literary, theatrical, or other
artistic influences. Throughout her film career, she
experimented with new ways of presenting characters'
inner emotions and exploring their psychological states
through cinematic means without ever being tied to one
particular avant-garde movement. Her editing techniques
have been compared to those of D. W. Griffith, creating
an unconscious reaction in the mind of the viewer. She
was also very skilled in incorporating music into her later
sound films to create visual and aural rhythms.

Dulac's pre-film background involved feminism and
journalism, and her films return time and again to
themes of femininity. Her films directly challenge the
romantic perceptions, metaphorical mythologies, and
social constructions of womanhood. She distinguishes
between male and female subjectivity in La Mort du soleil
(The Death of the Sun, 1922) and focuses on female
subjectivity in La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling
Madame Beudet, 1922), in which she uses a number of
special effects, lighting, and editing techniques to
represent directly the protagonist's thoughts and
imagination.

In 1927 Dulac came across surrealist Antonin
Artaud's screenplay for La Coquille et le clergyman ( The

Seashell and the Clergyman) , which he had deposited at a
film institute due to lack of funds to produce it. The
surrealists considered Dulac, who was already well
established in the Parisian avant-garde film community, to
be strictly impressionist — too loyal to traditions of
naturalism and symbolism for their liking. Dulac followed
Artaud's script closely in her 1928 film, only changing a
few practical elements when necessary. Yet Artaud claimed
she had butchered his script, and he staged a riot during
the premiere screening. Although Andre Breton had
expelled Artaud from the surrealists the previous year, the
group joined in the riot, screaming profanities and halting
projection of the film. La Coquille et le Clergyman was
removed from the program and its surrealism was
overshadowed that year by Dali and Bunuel's Un Chien
andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928). Though the
surrealists themselves rejected the film, most critics today
consider La Coquille et le Clergyman to be the first
surrealist film.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Ames defous (Crazy Souls or Souls of the Crazy Ones, 1918), La
Mart du soleil (The Death of the Sun, 1922), La Souriante
Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1922), La
Coquille et le clergyman ( The Seashell and the Clergyman,
1928)

FURTHER READING

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. To Desire Differently: Teminism and

the Trench Cinema. Expanded ed. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1996.
Hayward, Susan. Trench National Cinema. London and New

York: Routledge, 1993.
Kuenzli, Rudolf E., ed. Dada and Surrealist Tilm. New York:

Willis, Locker and Owens, 1987.
Short, Robert. The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema. London:

Creation Books, 2003.

Erin Foster

The film generally considered to be the masterpiece
of surrealist cinema, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian
Dog, 1928), was made by the painter Salvador Dali and
his college friend Luis Bunuel (1900-1983). By 1927,
the influence of surrealism was apparent in Dali's paint-

ing, although he was not officially a member of the
movement. Bunuel had worked in the film industry
through bit parts, odd jobs, and film criticism and was
looking to become a director. The idea for the film came
from an encounter between two of their dreams, and they

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185

Surrealism

Germaine Dulac. ROGER VIOLLET/ GETTY IMAGES.

wrote a script for it in a week. Their only rule was that no
idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explan-
ation of any kind would be used: all images in the film
had to be shocking and completely unexpected. Bunuel
brought rocks in his pockets to the premiere screening to
throw at the audience if they hated it, but the surrealists
loved it. The film had an eight-month run at the presti-
gious Studio 28, and Breton gave Bunuel the task of
advancing surrealist cinema.

Un Chien andalou begins with a title card reading
"Once upon a time ..." followed by a shot of a man
(played by Bunuel) sharpening a razor blade. After briefly
looking at the moon, he then slices a woman's eyeball
with the razor. This is followed by a shot of a cloud
drifting across the moon in a similar slicing manner, a
title card reading "Eight years later . . .," and a number
of unrelated scenes, including one in which ants crawl
out of a man's hand. By using audience expectation of
narrative conventions through the deceptive title cards,
the film draws in viewers before attacking them with
seemingly inexplicable surrealist images. Bunuel and
Dali play with and subvert Freudian imagery and sexual

symbolism as a form of criticism and parody. The mis-
leading narrative scaffolding, the eyeline matches, dis-
solves, and superimpositions all mock the cliches of
impressionist film. Though originally based on Bunuel
and Dali's dreams, Un Chien andalou is not a filmed
dream but an exploration of how the mind dreams and
creates meanings in the unconscious process.

The unprecedented success of Un Chien andalou was
both a blessing and a curse for surrealism. Audience
exposure to the film meant that the movement was get-
ting its message to the public, but the movement itself
was suspicious of success, especially commercial success,
because popularity meant surrealism was too easily diges-
tible and not reactionary enough. Breton was fearful of
the museumification of surrealism.

Bunuel and Dali's next film, L'Age d'or {The Golden
Age, 1930), was less accessible than Un Chien andalou.
Wealthy aristocrat Vicomte de Noailles commissioned
L'Age d'or in 1930 as a birthday present to his wife.
Originally meant to be a sequel to Un Chien andalou, it
was one of France's first sound films. Dali's input on this
film was much less significant than on Un Chien andalou,
and he eventually disowned the film, arguing that Bunuel
had betrayed his artistic intentions. The film was faithful
to surrealism, with its structural duality between gold
and feces, invoking a psychoanalytic link between the
basest and most precious of substances and mocking the
narrative conventions of classical cinema. During the
initial screening of the film, which subtly depicts Jesus
as a serial killer and mocks the ruling class and bourgeoi-
sie alike, a riot broke out in which angry audience mem-
bers chanted and threw ink on the screen and smoke
bombs into the crowd. They also destroyed a surrealist
exhibit in the lobby of the theater. L'Age d'or was banned
within three months of its release, and it was not seen
again until 1980. This invisibility worked to the
surrealists' advantage, as mystery and legend furthered
the film's notoriety.

Bunuel officially broke with the surrealists in 1932,
but his later films remained faithful to the surrealist ethic,
particularly Las Hurdes {Land Without Bread, 1933) and
Los Olvidados {The Young and the Damned, 1950). He
continued to use surrealist imagery and absurd narrative
techniques for the rest of his career, as evident in films
like El Angel exterminador {The Exterminating Angel,
1962); Simon del desierto {Simon of the Desert, 1965);
and his final film, Cet obscur objet du desir {That
Obscure Object of Desire, 1977). Dali went to
Hollywood to collaborate with Walt Disney in 1946
(on a seven-minute surrealist cartoon, "Destino," that
never passed the storyboarding phase) and Alfred
Hitchcock. Hitchcock liked Dali's understanding of psy-
choanalysis and hired him to create the sets for the

186

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Surrealism

The Surrealist film Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) was a collaboration between filmmaker Luis Buriuel
and painter Salvador Dali. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

surrealistic dream sequence in Spellbound (1945). All
other attempts Dali made at filmmaking proved unsuc-
cessful, and he soon after returned to painting.

Cinema came relatively late in the surrealist move-
ment, and it was never fully utilized, much to the regret
of Breton. This was probably due to the actual practical-
ities of filmmaking, which were inherently opposed to
the surrealist ideals of chance and automation. Buriuel
was the only surrealist to have gotten seriously involved
in the technical and practical aspects of the medium,
which may have also helped lead him to breaking with
the movement. Another limiting factor in surrealist film
experimentation was that amateur filmmaking was
extremely expensive until after World War II; afterward,
cheaper film equipment became available, but by then
the surrealist movement had disbanded. In 1947 Hans
Richter released Dreams That Money Can Buy, seven
short episodes that examine the unconscious, written by
and featuring Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Leger, Max
Ernst (1891-1976), and Alexander Calder (1898-1976).

Besides Bunuel's work, this is the last official surrealist
film.

Though surrealist film was limited, the artistic ideals
of surrealism have been influential for a number of film-
makers. American experimental filmmakers like Maya
Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger utilized the
surrealistic approach to push the boundaries of film
representation and shock audiences out of passive specta-
torship. Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) uses
a repetitive, loosely narrative structure and Freudian
symbolism to examine female subjectivity in cinema.
Brakhage sometimes painted or scratched abstract designs
directly onto celluloid, and films of his such as Dog Star
Man (1962) use repetitive or unrelated imagery in
ways that often alienate viewers. In Anger's dreamlike
Fireworks (1947), the director uses violent imagery to
explore his own homosexuality. The surrealist aesthetic
also is apparent in animation, particularly in Japanese
anime and in the work of eastern European animators
like Jan Svankmajer. European auteurs like Ingmar

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187

Surrealism

Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Wim Wenders also owe a
debt to surrealism. American filmmakers David Lynch
and Terry Gilliam and Canadian David Cronenberg also
rely heavily on surrealistic imagery, ironic juxtapositions,
misleading narrative devices, and Freudian symbolism to
shock, confuse, and challenge spectators.

SEE ALSO Art Cinema; Experimental Film; Fine Art;
France

FURTHER READING

Bigsby, C. W. E. Dada and Surrealism. London: Methuen, 1972.

Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated from the
French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Hammond, Paul, ed. The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist
Writings on Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1978.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E., ed. Dada and Surrealist Film. New York:
Willis, Locker and Owens, 1987.

Matthews, J. H. Surrealism and American Feature Films. Boston:
Twayne, 1979.

. Surrealism and Film. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1971.

Richter, Hans. Dada, Art and Anti-Art. Translated by David
Britt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Short, Robert. The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema. London:
Creation Books, 2003.

. Dada and Surrealism. London: Laurence King, 1994.

Erin Foster

188

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SWEDEN

Moving pictures first attracted large Swedish audiences at
the Stockholm exhibition in 1897. Though early silent
films were generally only a few minutes long and often
documented actual events, the erstwhile novelty rapidly
established itself as popular entertainment during the
next decade or so. In the absence of permanent movie
theaters, operators traveled around the country, some-
times with a single snippet of film, screening it in what-
ever locale was available. These inauspicious beginnings
notwithstanding, the artistic and commercial potential of
the medium was apparent to some. Among the pioneers
were the producer Charles Magnusson (1878-1948), the
cinematographer Julius Jaenzon (1885-1961); and two
directors, Victor Sjostrom (1879-1960) and Mauritz
Stiller (1883-1928), whose impact and contribution
reached far beyond national borders.

In 1909 Magnusson became head of the production
company Svenska Bio, renamed Svensk Filmindustri in
1919, which has dominated the industry ever since.
Magnusson established a chain of movie theaters as an
outlet for his films, a model of production and distribu-
tion that likewise still pertains. Magnusson's business
acumen was combined with professional competence —
he served occasionally as director, cameraman, and script-
writer — and artistic vision. He also had the foresight to
hire Jaenzon, Sjostrom, and Stiller.

THE "GOLDEN AGE" OF SILENT FILM

When they joined Svenska Bio in 1912, Sjostrom and
Stiller had considerable experience in the theater but
none in film. Both learned by doing, and they learned
quickly. Encouraged by Magnusson, they drew on liter-

ary and theatrical source material and on carefully crafted
scripts to convey fully developed fictional stories.
Together with Jaenzon, their primary cinematographer,
they experimented with innovative visual techniques such
as double exposure and the tracking shot. To avoid the
conventions and limitations of stage performance, they
promoted a less affected style of acting for the screen and
frequently filmed on location.

With Ingeborg Holm (1913), a complex, emotionally
riveting portrayal of a destitute woman who loses custody
of her children and goes mad, Sjostrom established a new
standard for narrative continuity. The film's criticism of
the country's poor laws led to heated debate and legis-
lative reform. Social commentary is also implicit in the
pacifist message of the historical drama Terje Vigen
(A Man There Was, 1917) and in Berg-Ejvind och bans
hustru {The Outlaw and His Wife, 1918), where the
protagonist has become a thief to feed his starving family.
In both, Sjostrom played the lead, performing his own
stunts in dramatic outdoor scenes.

Sjostrom and Stiller each adapted for the screen sev-
eral prose works of Nobel Prize— winner Selma Lagerlof
(1858-1940), then Sweden's most acclaimed living writer.
Film versions of Lagerlof s texts reached a large audience
both at home and abroad; collaboration with her not only
enhanced the prestige of Sjostrom and Stiller but also drew
attention to the expressive capabilities of their chosen
medium. Tosen fran Stormyrtorpet (The Girl from the
Marsh Croft, 1917) recalls other Sjostrom films in its social
indignation. In Ingmarssonerna (The Sons oflngmar, 1919)
and Karin Ingmarsdotter (Karin, Daughter of Ingmar,
1920), both based on Lagerlof s novel, Jerusalem (2 vols.,
1901-1902), idyllic nature scenes of birches, lakes, and

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Sweden

flowering meadows created a filmic representation of
"Swedishness" that has subsequendy become codified.
Korkarlen {The Phantom Carriage, 1921), another Lagerlof
adaptation, shows Sjostrom's mastery of continuity edit-
ing. It employs a complex flashback structure, alternating
gritty realism with evocative, dreamlike sequences that
feature double, even triple exposure as the protagonist,
David Holm (played by Sjostrom), is jolted into awareness
of his past mistakes. Psychologically compelling as well as
visually stunning, The Phantom Carriage brought Sjostrom
international acclaim.

In 1923 he moved to Hollywood, where (credited as
Seastrom) he made several powerful features: He Who
Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926), and The
Wind (1928), the latter two starring Lillian Gish. After
returning to Sweden in 1930, Sjostrom worked primarily
in the theater but in the 1940s served as artistic consul-
tant to Svensk Filmindustri, where he mentored Ingmar
Bergman (b. 1918).

Stiller's films fall largely into two categories, erotic
comedies and psychological dramas based on works of
Lagerlof. The comedies, which include Karlek och jour-
nalistik {Love and Journalism, 1916), Thomas Graals bdsta
film {Thomas Graal's Best Film or Wanted: A Film Actress,
1917), Thomas Graals bdsta barn {Thomas Graals First
Child, 1918), and Erotikon {Bounds That Chafe, 1920),
are set in upper-class milieus and reflect Stiller's cosmo-
politan orientation. Particularly in the Thomas Graal
films, his approach is eclectic, with sight gags and phys-
ical "business"; elements of drawing-room comedy and
bedroom farce; and intertitles offering witty, sometimes
ironic commentary on the action. Thomas Graal's Best
Film incorporates a tongue-in-cheek inside view of the
film industry and uses flashbacks and imagined recon-
structions to explore the divergence between reality and
various representations of it.

In all of Stiller's Lagerlof adaptations — Herr Ames
pengar {Sir Arne's Treasure, 1919), Gunnar Hedes saga
{The Blizzard, 1923), and Gosta Berlings saga {The
Atonement of Gosta Berling, 1924) — striking visuals in
outdoor scenes create drama and suspense. Sir Arne's
Treasure embodies the ghosts that haunt Elsalill and Sir
Archie in eerie, double-exposed images. Though less
psychologically persuasive, the episodic Gosta Berling
launched Greta Garbo (1905-1990) as an international
star. Stiller accompanied her to Hollywood in 1924 but
never made another film.

Many films of the silent period have been lost,
making comprehensive or comparative critical assessment
difficult. Though other Swedish directors, notably Georg
af Klercker (1877—1951), were successful at home, none
achieved the recognition of Sjostrom and Stiller abroad.
Their central role in the worldwide development of

narrative film is widely acknowledged, but retrospectively
their films also seem paradigmatic in ways that continue
to resonate in a specifically Swedish context. In several
seminal works, nature is not only a spectacular visual
backdrop but intrinsic to the story itself, a pattern that
recurs in Swedish popular film as well as art cinema.
Emblematic images of the Swedish summer in Sjostrom's
Lagerlof films established an iconography that count-
less later films have referred to and embellished. Not
coincidentally, Jaenzon, the primary creator of the visual
style associated with Sjostrom and Stiller, trained virtually
every important cinematographer of the next generation,
including Bergman's first major collaborator, Gunnar
Fischer (b. 1910).

THE FIRST DECADES OF SOUND

After the departure of Sjostrom and Stiller, Swedish film
production declined in quantity as well as quality, reach-
ing a low point in 1929, when only six indigenous works
premiered. Non- Swedish films, largely from the United
States, made up the slack. The arrival of simultaneous
sound and image recording at the beginning of the new
decade brought profound changes to the industry. With
the language barrier hampering exports, the domestic
market predominated, but as moviegoing became
increasingly popular, film production expanded again,
to about twenty-five features per year during the 1930s.
Chains of movie theaters were established throughout the
country, the number doubling over the course of the
decade, and several production companies arose in com-
petition with Svensk Filmindustri, notably Europa Film
(1930) and Sandrews (1937). In response to continuing
Hollywood imports, the industry favored subtitles rather
than dubbing, a consensus that still applies today.

The 1930s was a period of enormous change in
Swedish society: the Social Democratic Party came to
power in 1932 and the fundamental social legislation of
the welfare state was put into place, but the country was
also experiencing an economic depression. Almost all
films of the decade responded to this social and economic
instability by offering comforting images of security that
focused on the preservation of the status quo, with con-
ventionally happy endings rewarding virtue and punishing
deviant, scandalous, or sinful behavior. The dominant
film genres were comedy, generally with stage roots, and
melodrama, where narrative patterns often were borrowed
from Hollywood. Though the somewhat derisive term
"pilsner-film" characterizes 1930s comedies as light, frothy
entertainment, the focus in popular film on the family,
domesticity, and conservative traditional values provides
insight into the prevailing attitudes and concerns of the
period.

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Sweden

Among the more skillful, versatile, and productive
directors was Gustaf Molander (1888-1973), who had
gained professional experience as a scriptwriter for
Sjostrom and Stiller. Two Molander films, Swedenhielms
(Swedenhielms Family, 1935), a comedy that exemplifies
supposedly typical traits of the Swedish aristocracy, and
Intermezzo (1936), a melodrama about an extramarital
affair between a concert violinist and his accompanist,
featured Gosta Ekman (1890-1938), the reigning matinee
idol of the day, and a fresh discovery, Ingrid Bergman
(1915—1982). The latter made several more films with
Molander before leaving for Hollywood, the English-
language remake of Intermezzo, titled Intermezzo: A Love
Story (1939), and an international career. During World
War II, Molander skirted censorship restrictions aimed at
preserving Sweden's neutrality by directing three films that
condemned Nazi oppression. His sixty-two films over a
four-decade period include three scripted by Ingmar
Bergman.

Spared direct involvement in the war, Sweden expe-
rienced a period of remarkable economic prosperity in its
aftermath, with an influx of workers going from the
countryside to urban areas as industry expanded.
During the 1940s the number of Swedish films produced
reached an all-time high, an average of more than forty
each year. Film imports resumed after a wartime hiatus
and movie attendance soared. While the pre-war orienta-
tion toward escapist comedy and farce receded, contem-
porary social reality remained conspicuously absent in the
indigenous subgenre that dominated the 1940s and
1950s, the rural melodrama, which expressed nostalgia
for Sweden's agrarian past. By idealizing and romanticiz-
ing the hardworking, self-reliant, God-fearing farmer and
promoting the central unifying values of loyalty to the
land and a traditional way of life, these films convey a
fossilized image of Swedish national identity and a world-
view that has little sympathy for social change.
Conversely, the forces of modernity, associated with the
city and the allure of its superficial lifestyle, are viewed
with skepticism.

One of the most popular films of the period, Hon
dansade en sommar {One Summer of Happiness, Arne
Mattsson, 1951), embodies the city versus country motif
in a doomed love affair, narrated in an extended flash-
back to underscore a sense of fatalism. Documentary
filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff (1917-2001) also focused
on the pastoral in nature shorts like Skuggor over snon
{Shadows on the Snow, 1949), using cross-cutting to
introduce dramatic tension and narrative continuity.
Genre distinctions are blurred in Sucksdorff s feature-
length Det stora dventyret {The Great Adventure, 1953),
which combines extensive documentary footage of ani-
mals and the natural world with a fictional parable about
the lost paradise of childhood innocence. Nostalgia is

communicated both visually and verbally through the
reminiscences of the voice-over narrator.

Among the directors who established themselves
during the 1940s, two stand out: Alf Sjoberg and
Ingmar Bergman. Sjoberg, a theoretician who experi-
mented with different cinematic styles, was seldom con-
strained by genre conventions. Several of his films
nevertheless incorporate characteristic rural settings and
iconographic imagery, in particular Himlaspelet {The
Heavenly Play, 1942), an allegorical Everyman narrative
that draws on provincial folkloristic motifs. Bara en mor
{Only a Mother, 1949) delineates the life trajectory of an
impoverished farm laborer's wife but also addresses
broader social concerns, as does Hets {Torment, 1944), a
scathing indictment of the hierarchical, regimented struc-
ture of the school system and the bourgeois family.
Though scripted by Bergman, visually the film is
Sjoberg's, with expressionistic use of shadows and fre-
quent high- or low-angle shots.

As a stage director, Sjoberg was renowned for inno-
vative approaches to the classics, including works of
August Strindberg (1849-1912), Sweden's greatest
dramatist. Sjoberg's film version of Strindberg's Froken
Julie {Miss Julie, 1951) opens up and extrapolates from
the play to include interpolated scenes, characters, even
subplots. Eschewing the conventional dissolve to indicate
a flashback, Sjoberg positions past and present within the
same space, even the same frame, a striking visual tech-
nique that also reinforces the theme of hereditary influ-
ences on character development. With a definitive
performance by Anita Bjork (b. 1925) in the title role,
Miss Julie won international accolades. Two later
Strindberg adaptations, Karin Mansdotter (1954) and
Fadern {The Father, 1969), were less successful.

In Sweden, Bergman has generally been perceived
as outside the mainstream, but several films of the 1950s,
in particular Sommarlek {Summer Interlude, 1951),
Sommaren med Monika {Summer with Monika, 1953),
and the many-layered comedy Sommarnattens leende
{Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955), use nature to frame
and highlight the story in ways that recall both Sjostrom
and the visual repertory of the rural melodrama. The
subject matter of Torment and Summer with Monika,
youthful rebellion against societal constraints, is a cine-
matic commonplace not restricted to that period.

Bergman was the first Swedish director since
Sjostrom and Stiller to figure importantly in an interna-
tional context. He frequently explored complex psycho-
logical, interpersonal, and existential issues, in historical
settings in Gycklarnas afton {Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953),
Det sjunde inseglet {The Seventh Seal, 1957), Ansiktet {The
Magician, 1958), and Jungfrukallan {The Virgin Spring,
1960) and in contemporary milieus in Smultronstdllet

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191

Sweden

INGMAR BERGMAN

b. Ernst Ingmar Bergman, Uppsala, Sweden, 14 July 1918

Bergman was the only Swedish film director of the post-war
period to achieve international renown; in his homeland he was
equally celebrated for his groundbreaking theater productions.
The son of a prominent Lutheran minister, he studied briefly at
the University of Stockholm but soon turned his attention to
writing and directing plays. In 1943 he was recruited as a
scriptwriter for Svensk filmindustri and gradually assigned
more responsibility, directing his own screenplay for the first
time in 1949, with Fangelse (Prison). Though considered the
quintessential auteur, Bergman collaborated closely with a
small team of actors, including Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max von
Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin,
Gunnel Lindblom, and Liv Ullmann as well as technicans such
as the acclaimed cinematographer Sven Nykvist. For von
Sydow and Ullmann in particular, appearances in Bergman
films led to international careers.

The sophisticated comedy Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of
a Summer Night, 1955), which illustrates and comments on
different kinds of love through the interaction of four couples,
won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956.
Thenceforth, each Bergman film attracted international
attention. In Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957), the
convincingly recreated medieval setting also functions
allegorically, with the Plague a stand-in for potential nuclear
disaster or a new pandemic. The Knight's existential doubt as
he tries to outwit Death in a game of chess has similarly
modern overtones and has been parodied by, among others,
Woody Allen in Love and Death (1975). Smultronst'dllet (Wild
Strawberries, 1957) pays tribute to Victor Sjostrom by casting
him in his final, memorable role and to Sjostrom's masterpiece,
Korkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921), by emulating its
theme and flashback structure. In these and other black and
white films of the 1950s, the cinematographer Gunnar Fischer
employs high contrast to create images of striking plasticity.

The trilogy Sasom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly,
1961) , Nattvardsgasterna (Winter Light, 1963), and Tystnaden
( The Silence, 1 963) expands on the existential questioning of
The Seventh Seal in a contemporary context, tentatively
suggesting in the first film that love and open communication
can replace an absent God, questioning that conclusion
through the doubting minister of Winter Light, and
seemingly rejecting it entirely in The Silence. The daringly
experimental Persona (1966) illustrates a more profound
breakdown — of communication, of identity, of the film

medium itself. The vulnerability of the performer or artist is
another recurring topic in, for instance, Gycklamas afton ( The
Naked Night or Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953), Ansiktet (The
Magician, 1958), and Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf, 1968).

In the increasingly politicized Sweden of the 1 960s,
Bergman's focus on religious and philosophical issues and
individual psychology was judged an irrelevant anomaly;
Skammen (Shame, 1968), a powerful antiwar statement, was
criticized because it did not delineate the ideology of the
opposing sides. In Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers,
1972), the symbolic use of color underscores Bergman's
exploration of female psychology, which continued with
Hoestsonaten (Autumn Sonata, 1978), a study of mother-
daughter relationships that marked the return to Swedish film
of Ingrid Bergman, in her penultimate role. Ingmar
Bergman's official farewell to the cinema came with Fanny och
Alexander (Fanny and Alexander, 1982), a masterful summing
up of his thematic preoccupations and simultaneously an
affirmation of the magical, transformative power of art.
Bergman's parallel career as a theater director continued until
2003, interspersed with the publication of memoirs and
scripts and occasional directing for television (Larmar och gor
sig till [Ln the Presence of a Clown] ,1997 and Saraband, 2003) .

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, 1951), Sommarnattens leende
(Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955), Det Sjunde inseglet (The
Seventh Seal, 1957), Smultronst 'dllet {Wild Strawberries, 1957),
Jungfrukdllan (The Virgin Spring, 1960), Sasom i en spegel
(Through a Glass Darkly, 1961), Nattvardsgasterna (Winter
Light, 1963), Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963), En Passion (The
Passion of Anna, 1969), Viskningar och rop (Cries and
Whispers, 1972), Trollflojten (The Magic Flute, 1975), Ansikte
mot ansikte (Face to Face, 1976)

FURTHER READING

Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. Translated by
Marianne Ruuth. New York: Arcade, 1994.

. The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography. Translated by

Joan Tate. New York: Viking and London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1988.

Simon, John. Ingmar Bergman Directs. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Steene, Birgitta, ed. Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005.

Wood, Robin. Ingmar Bergman. New York: Praeger and
London: Studio Vista, 1969.

Rochelle Wright

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Ingmar Bergman. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

{Wild Strawberries, 1957), Sasom i en spegel (Through a
Glass Darkly, 1961), Nattvardsgdsterna (Winter Light,
1963), Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963), and Persona
(1966). Bergman's intensely personal vision — he wrote
most of his own screenplays — aligned him with other
European auteur directors of the 1950s and 1960s (such
as those associated with the French New Wave) who
situated cinema as an intellectually challenging and artis-
tically sophisticated medium. In Sweden Bergman's films
were often admired but seldom popular, and within the
fdm industry his international prominence elicited both
pride and resentment.

Several contemporaries of Sjoberg and Bergman also
made significant contributions in the 1940s and 1950s.
The prolific Hasse Ekman (1915-2004), son of Gosta,
specialized in screwball comedy but also scripted and
directed sensitive and psychologically convincing dramas
such as Ombyte av tag (Change of Trains, 1943), which
prefigures the British film, Brief Encounter (1945); the
antifascist Excellensen (His Excellency, 1944); and Flicka
och hyacinter (Girl with Hyacinths, 1950), where the
lesbian motif is treated sympathetically and without sen-

sationalism. Hampe Faustman (1919-1961) established
a unique profile by introducing political and social topics
such as the rights of farm workers (Ndr dngarna blommar
[When Meadows Bloom], 1946), arms smuggling during
the Spanish civil war (Frdmmande hamn [Foreign Port],
1948), and the situation of outsider figures (Lars Hard,
1948 and Gud Fader och tattaren [God the Father and the
Gypsy], 1954). By the early 1960s, however, Faustman
had died and Ekman had retired; Sucksdorff lacking
financing for his projects, had moved abroad; and
Sjoberg was working mostly in the theater. Though con-
tinuity was provided by, among others, Bergman, a para-
digm shift occurred in the film world as a younger
generation of directors gradually came to prominence.

THE FILM REFORM

The most dramatic catalyst for change in the Swedish
film industry was the introduction of television in 1956.
By 1963 movie attendance had been reduced by half,
leading to an economic crisis and radical reorganization
through state intervention. The purpose of the film
reform of that year was not only to rescue the industry
from financial catastrophe, but also to encourage the
production of so-called "quality film" and to recognize
the cinema as a significant artistic and cultural medium
worthy of government support and serious, professional
study. The entertainment tax on film was eliminated,
with 10 percent of the money generated by ticket
sales instead going directly to the newly founded non-
profit Swedish Film Institute, headed by Harry Schein
(b. 1924), which supported selected "quality films" with
direct subsidy as well as compensation for financial losses
incurred. Through SFI, a film school to train directors,
cinematographers, and sound technicians was established
in 1964, and in 1969 film studies became an academic
discipline at the University of Stockholm.

The effects of the film reform were far-reaching.
Though the new system was imperfect (and has been
modified periodically), it encouraged artistically ambi-
tious directors by reducing their dependence on commer-
cial success. About sixty feature film directors debuted in
the decade following the reform, among them Vilgot
Sjoman (1924-2006), Bo Widerberg (1930-1997), Jan
Troell (b. 1931), and Mai Zetterling (1925-1994).

Sjoman's Jag dr nyfiken—gul (I Am Curious [Yellow],
1967) epitomizes Swedish film of the 1960s in its polit-
ical orientation, documentary emphasis, collaborative
and improvisational method, and sexual frankness. A
kaleidoscope illustrating Swedish attitudes toward politi-
cal and social matters, both at home and abroad, the film
intersperses actual interviews with several layers of fic-
tional narrative. Though L Am Curious (Yellow) includes
full frontal nudity, Sjoman's primary goal was not to

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Sweden

Ingmar Bergman explored personal and existential issues in such films as Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

shock but to reflect contemporary attitudes and challenge
cinematic expectations and taboos, in part by presenting
sex as decidedly unglamorous. In Sweden, where violence
rather than nudity or sexual content tends to be censored,
the film premiered uncut. Abroad, I Am Curious (Yellow)
was marketed as soft-core pornography. The American
print, released only after a prolonged court battle, elim-
inated nearly half an hour of political commentary but
none of the sex scenes.

While Sjoman's post- 1960s career faded, Widerberg
and Troell evolved in different directions. Widerberg's
early films, including Kvarteret Korpen {Raven's End,
1963), about the dreams and aspirations of a working-
class youth, are partly autobiographical; Elvira Madigan
(1967), a star-crossed love story that garnered interna-
tional attention, is a lyrical mood piece, beautifully pho-
tographed. In Adalen 31 (The Adalen Riots, 1969) and
Joe Hill (1971), the visual imagery remains striking, but
Widerberg's focus on individual fates also encompasses a

political dimension. Though the overt subject matter of
both films is historical — a 1931 labor dispute in northern
Sweden in which four people were killed and the legen-
dary Swedish-American labor agitator and songwriter
executed in 1915 — audiences could draw contemporary
parallels. Two Widerberg thrillers, Mannen pa. taket {The
Man on the Roof, 1976) and Mannen fran Mallorca {The
Man from Majorca, 1984), expose corruption in high
places, while Ormens vdg pa hdlleberget {The Serpents
Way, 1986) depicts the struggle to retain human dignity
in the face of poverty and sexual abuse. In Lust och fdgring
stor {All Things Fair, 1995), where a woman teacher
initiates an affair with a male pupil, Widerberg returned
to the personal sphere.

Troell initially gravitated to classic works of Swedish
literature that illuminate particular historical epochs. His
faithful yet imaginative and visually compelling adapta-
tions include Har har du ditt liv {Here's Your Life, 1966),
a poetic coming-of-age story set in northern Sweden

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during World War I; the two-part epic Utvandrarna {The
Emigrants, 1971) and Nybyggarna {The New Land,
1972), about a group of impoverished farmers who leave
southern Sweden in 1850 to forge a new life in
Minnesota; and Ingenjor Andrees lufifdrd {The Flight of
the Eagle, 1982), depicting an ill-fated attempt in the
1890s to reach the North Pole by balloon. Hamsun
(1996) and Sa vit som en sn'6 {As White as in Snow,
2001) offer fictionalized interpretations of historical fig-
ures, the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian author who
became a Nazi sympathizer and Sweden's first aviatrix.
Troell's long, leisurely paced films allow the narrative to
evolve organically, largely through evocative images.

Though / Am Curious spawned some exploitation
films, mostly for the export market, its predominantly
female perspective on sexuality is symptomatic of the
shifting cinematic examination of gender roles in the
1960s and beyond. In Lars-Magnus Lindgren's (1922-
2004) Kare John {Dear John, 1964), both romantic part-
ners affirm a connection between physical intimacy and
emotional openness. Mai Zetterling highlights female
psychology and eroticism in Alskande par {Loving
Couples, 1964). Zetterling, an ingenue in films of the
1940s, including Torment, became a trailblazer for
women directors, though after the visually experimental
Doktor Glas {Doctor Glas, 1968) she worked mostly in
England. Stig Bjorkman and Gunnel Lindblom exam-
ined the social, emotional, and sexual repercussions of
divorce for individual women in Den vita vdggen {The
White Wall, 1975) and Sally och friheten {Sally and
Freedom, 1981), respectively. Lindblom's Paradistorg
{Paradise Place, 1977) and Sommarkvdllar pa jorden
{Summer Nights, 1 987) recall Zetterling's focus on family
constellations and relationships among women. Unlike
most contemporaries, Hasse Alfredson (b. 1931) and
Tage Danielsson (1928-1985) conveyed social commen-
tary through humor in their creative partnership. Att
angora en brygga {Docking the Boat, 1965) spoofs
Swedish traditions and national types; in Appelkriget
{The Apple War, 1971), folklore creatures assist the local
population in an environmental cause. Picassos dventyr
{The Adventures of Picasso, 1978), a send-up of commer-
cial exploitation in the art world, broadened the satirical
scope.

RECENT TRENDS

Familiar genres such as the romantic comedy and the
detective or secret agent drama also flourished after the
film reform. Drawing especially large crowds in the
1980s and 1990s were a series of comedies by Lasse
Aberg (b. 1940) about charter trips to various destina-
tions and six heist films featuring the bumbling Jonsson
League thieves. In the 1 970s television, no longer solely a

competitor, began co-producing films in return for
broadcast rights. Contemporary features frequently reach
a far larger audience on the air than in theatrical release;
popular films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s have
likewise experienced a renaissance thanks to television.

Though Hollywood imports dominate the market,
Swedish-produced features have premiered at a steady
rate of from twenty to twenty-five a year in the last
several decades. Since around 1980, women directors
have gradually established themselves on an equal foot-
ing. Among the most prominent is Suzanne Osten
(b. 1944), whose films cover a wide range: a sensitive
portrait of her mother in Mamma {Our Life Is Now,
1982); a revealing backstage account of an avant-garde
opera production in Broderna Mozart {The Mozart
Brothers, 1986); an investigation of the psychosocial
causes of neo-Nazism in Tola! Det dr sd morkt {Speak
Up! It's So Dark, 1993); and a more lighthearted consid-
eration of race and gender in Bara du mnd {Nature's
Revenge, 1983) and films about the nomadic Saami,
while the "Mods" trilogy — Dom kallar oss mods {They
Call Us Misfits, 1968), Ett anstdndigt liv {A Respectable
Life, 1979), and Det sociala arvet {The Social Contract,
1993) — provided a condensed social history of a lost
urban generation.

Because children's culture has a high profile in
Sweden, many well-crafted features are aimed at young
audiences. Olle Hellbom's (1925-1982) popular adapta-
tions of stories by Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002), includ-
ing several Pippi Longstocking tales and the allegorical
fantasy Broderna Lejonhjarta {The Brothers Lionheart,
1977), set the standard. Kay Pollak debuted with the
children's film Elvis! Elvis! (1976), but Barnens o
{Children's Island, 1980), featuring a pre-adolescent boy
as the protagonist, is intended primarily for adults. Two
similar films, Lasse Hallstrom's (b. 1946) bittersweet
Mitt liv som hund {My Life as a Dog, 1985) and Ake
Sandgren's (b. 1955) less idyllic Kddisbellan {The
Slingshot, 1993), did well internationally; Hallstrom went
on to a successful Hollywood career with such films as
What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), The Cider House
Rules (1999), and Chocolat (2000).

Especially since the 1990s, films about and for
young adults have gained ground. In Fucking Amal
{Show Me Love, 1998), which had considerable crossover
appeal, Lukas Moodysson (b. 1969) encapsulates the
boredom and frustration of small-town teenagers.
Tillsammans {Together, 2000) gives a similarly dead-on
group portrayal of a 1970s commune where political and
sexual issues become entwined. Subsequent Moodysson
films explore darker subject matter: the recruitment of a
young Russian girl to sex slavery in Sweden in Lilja 4-ever
(2002) and the making of a pornographic film in the

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provocative Ett hal i mitt hjdrta {A Hole in My Heart,
2004).

Since the 1950s Sweden has undergone a major
demographic transformation from relative homogeneity
to multicultural diversity. Various filmmakers have
depicted the experience of immigrants and refugees
adjusting to another culture, among them Johan
Bergenstrahle in Jag heter Stelios {Foreigners, 1972),
Marianne Ahrne in Frihetens murar {The Walls of
Freedom, 1978), and Carlo Barsotti in Ett Paradis utan
biljard {A Paradise Without Billiards, 1991). The 1990s
brought a reconsideration of matters pertaining to World
War II and Jewish identity in, for instance, Kjell Grede's
God afton, Herr Wallenberg {Good Evening, Mr.
Wallenberg, 1990) and Susanne Bier's (b. 1960) Freud
flyttar hemifran {Freud's Leaving Home, 1991). Around
the year 2000, several directors with roots in the Middle
East turned their attention to the next generation, espe-
cially young women struggling to negotiate between two
cultural spheres: Josef Fares (b. 1977) in Jalla! Jalla!
(2000), Reza Bagher (b. 1958) in Vingar av glas {Wings
of Glass, 2000), and Susan Taslimi in Hus i helvete {All
Hell Let Loose, 2002). Directors from non- Swedish back-
grounds increasingly reflect their own cultural integration
by widening their focus. The immigrant protagonist in
Reza Parsa's Fore stormen {Before the Storm, 2000) con-
fronts an ethical dilemma arising from the past, but his
life in Sweden is otherwise unproblematic. Bagher's
Populdrmusik fran Vittula {Popular Music from Vittula,

2004) incorporates a quite different minority, Finnish
speakers in the far north, while Fares's Kopps {Cops,
2003) does not address immigrant issues at all.

FURTHER READING

Cowie, Peter. Swedish Cinema, from "Ingeborg Holm " to "Fanny
and Alexander." Stockholm: The Swedish Institute, 1985.

Forslund, Bengt. Victor Sjdstrom, His Life and His Work.

Translated by Peter Cowie. New York: New York Zoetrope,
1988.

Fullerton, John, and Jan Olsson, eds. Nordic Explorations: Film
Before 1930. London: J. Libbey, 1999.

Mcllroy, Brian. Sweden. World Cinema series, no. 2. London:

Flicks Books, 1986.
Nestingen, Andrew, and Trevor G. Elkington, eds. National

Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition.

Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005.
Qvist, Per Olov, and Peter von Bagh. Guide to the Cinema of

Sweden and Finland. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood

Press, 2000.

Soila, Tytti, Astrid Soderberg Widding, and Gunnar Iversen.
Nordic National Cinemas. London and New York: Routledge,
1998.

Wright, Rochelle. The Visible Wall: Jews and Other Ethnic
Outsiders in Swedish Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1998.

Rochelle Wright

196

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TECHNOLOGY

Ever since the invention of motion pictures, movie indus-
tries around the world have counted on a stream of
technological developments to maximize production
processes, increase profits, and entice audiences. Yet the
history of film technology, spanning a little over one
century, is a finite one, more subtle and incremental than
one might assume. Indeed, the basics of film production
went largely unchanged for a good part of the last cen-
tury. Other than several watershed innovations that
required systemic overhauls, such as synchronized sound,
wide-screen formats, and color processes, most techno-
logical innovations were small by comparison, affecting
the final product in ways that were often not noticeable
to most viewers.

Only recently, in the past few decades, has the
industry begun to explore new alternatives to conven-
tional film stock, editing techniques, and the basic
motion picture camera. One explanation is the unique-
ness of the movies as a manufactured product. Unlike
other technology products, such as automobiles, televi-
sion sets, and appliances, the movies are neither tangible
nor utilized in any conventional way by consumers. The
product is less material than it is imagistic, something to
be recounted and remembered rather than owned and
handled. In the case of television, however, consumers do
more than watch it. They own, display, and control the
machine, which explains, in part, the medium's dramatic
technological changes (remote control, cable, Tivo, flat-
screen, and VHS/DVD). Movie formats have undergone
dramatic changes as well, of course, but on the whole
they have been more sporadic and aimed at attracting
moviegoers during box-office slumps. Another, more
compelling reason for the relative constancy of motion

picture technology has been a reluctance on the part of
movie industries — and especially the eight major and
minor studios of classical Hollywood — to make systemic
changes requiring costly, comprehensive overhauls of the
industry. Nonetheless, and sometimes against its will, the
moviemaking industries around the world have adopted
new technologies in response to audience interests, eco-
nomic imperatives, societal shifts, and aesthetic trends.

EARLY MOTION PICTURES

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing throughout the
century, series photography generated early interest in the
possibilities of motion pictures. Inventors and entrepre-
neurs quickly recognized the entertainment value of sim-
ulating the movement of photographs, such that by the
middle of the nineteenth century a variety of peephole
toys and coin machines were appearing in arcade parlors
throughout the United States and Europe. These pre-
cinematic mechanisms were crucial in the technological
leap from still photography to motion pictures projected
on big screens for paying audiences. One of the earliest
toys was the Zoetrope, a handheld spinning wheel with a
series of photographs on the inside, visible to the viewer
by thin slits along the top. The Mutoscope, a coin
machine found in arcades, enabled viewers to see a series
of photo cards flip by at the turn of a crank.

These early peephole toys and experiments with
sequence photography indicate that the premise of the
movies — that is, a sequential series of pictures on cards or
film passed by the eye fast enough to suggest continuous
movement — was well in place before the first motion
pictures were made and projected onto a screen. Three

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Technology

critical components, however, were missing: light-sensi-
tive and fast film rolls that could travel through a camera
and capture the action sequentially on frames; a camera
that would record this action; and a projector that could
run the film at such a pace and with enough light to
throw the images, in seeming motion, onto a large
screen.

In 1882 Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), a French
physiologist, invented the "chronophotographic gun" to
record animal locomotion. The camera initially captured
images on glass plates, but Marey soon switched to an
easier, more manipulable format, paper film, thus intro-
ducing the film strip to cinematography and setting the
stage for further developments. Indeed, only a few years
later, in 1887, an Episcopalian minister from New Jersey,
Hannibal Goodwin (1822-1900), developed the first
celluloid roll film as a base for light-sensitive emulsions.
Goodwin's success with celluloid film rolls was particu-
larly significant because it made possible motion picture
cameras and projection. George Eastman (1854-1932)
soon thereafter adapted Goodwin's roll film, patented it,
and made it the industry standard by 1890. Eastman
Kodak issued this same basic stock, in rolls of two hun-
dred feet, all the while making technical innovations to
improve its quality. Eastman and his laboratories made it
the most dependable film stock, and by 1910 studios and
filmmakers from around the world were using it.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), inventor and
entrepreneur, was in many ways an unlikely but impor-
tant figure in the history of movie technology. Long
before the first talkies, Edison was arguably the first to
envision motion pictures as a marriage of image and
sound. Before his company patented motion picture
cameras — among other technologies vital to producing
and projecting movies — he invented the phonograph, for
which he always dreamed of producing visual accompani-
ment. Toward this end, he sought to invent a camera that
would shoot a series of images onto a strip of film that,
when projected at a certain speed, would convey a con-
tinuous sequence resembling live action. In 1883 he
hired the young William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
(1860-1935), who would greatly aid him in this quest.
By 1895, Dickson ran Edison's West Orange, New
Jersey, laboratory. After working on this project for a
number of years, Dickson invented the first motion
picture camera in 1891.

Borrowing from several earlier mechanisms, includ-
ing time watch engineering and Marey's chronophoto-
graphic gun, Dickson came up with an instrument called
the Kinetograph. What distinguished this new camera
from other devices of the same period were two crucial
additions, both of which remained defining attributes of
motion picture cameras and projection throughout the

twentieth century. First, it made use of a stop-motion
device to regulate the intermittent motion of the film
strip through the camera at various rates of frames per
second (typically, 16 fps during the silent era and 24 fps
for talking pictures). This allowed for the unexposed film
strip to pause for a fraction of a second, during which
time the shutter briefly opened long enough to suffi-
ciently expose the film to a beam of light. Second,
Dickson added sprocket holes on one side of the celluloid
film strip, which could then be pulled through the
machine by teethed gears. As Dickson carefully notes in
his History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-
Phonograph, originally published in 1895, these perfora-
tions allowed for the locking device to keep the film in
place for nine-tenths of a second, as the shutter opens
and admits a beam of light long enough to expose the
film.

The Kinetograph shot short films in 50-foot install-
ments (typically less than 30 seconds), which could then
be viewed in the Kinetoscope, a battery-powered coin
machine — one of the last of its kind before motion
picture exhibition became geared toward collective audi-
ences — also designed by Edison's company. Unlike later
projectors, this one operated at over 40 frames per sec-
ond, nearly three times faster than what would become
the standard rate. Soon entire parlor halls were filled
with Kinetoscopes, drawing in customers who indivi-
dually watched a number of short movies. Using the
Kinetograph, Dickson shot thousands of short films in
what was the first motion-picture studio, "the Black
Maria," a barnlike structure with a sliding roof that
allowed sunlight to enter and illuminate the subjects
being shot. Since the camera was large and immobile,
the "action" needed to be brought before it. The shorts
were thus one-shot, one-scene "movies."

In spite of its unwieldy size and relatively primitive
mechanics, the Kinetograph influenced nearly every
motion picture camera made since, but especially those
that followed in the decade after. Like their predecessor,
these cameras were typically made of wood, sat on a box
or tripod, had a hand crank for shooting and projecting,
and came with sprockets that drove the film through the
machine. In Europe several important early filmmakers
and inventors adapted the Kinetograph to fit their own
needs, which included more versatile, mobile filmmaking
as well as projection. The French Lumiere brothers,
Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), invented
the Cinematographe in 1895, a remarkable machine that
was camera, printer, and projector all in one device. The
Lumieres became famous for shooting their popular
actualites, short, single-shot films of locations and scenar-
ios, such as oncoming trains, people kissing, and distant
lands. Unlike the Kinetograph, the Cinematographe was
light and more easily transportable, able to capture city

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Technology

scenes and "exotic" locales at a time when few were able
to travel the world.

With the rapid growth of camera technology came
attendant developments in projection. Many early cam-
eras were also used as projectors, whereby an arc-light
source would be attached to the back, which could be
opened for projection purposes. Arc lights were a popular
and powerful source of illumination for early theater and
photographic portraiture, and were later used for motion
picture production at a time when less sensitive film
stocks required powerful lighting for full exposure. As
early as 1888, Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince (1842-
c.1890), working in England, rivaled Dickson and his
Kinetograph by patenting a motion picture camera-
projector that used perforated film and intermittent
stop-go motion. (Prince might have become more than a
footnote in the early history of motion pictures had he and
his machinery not disappeared without a trace in 1890.)

Several problems with early projection engineering
needed solving, however. First, there was the matter of
precisely regulating the film roll's intermittent but con-
sistent movement through the machine, such that each
frame would travel between the projection lamp and the
open shutter for the same duration and at the correct
pace for proper projection. German film pioneer Oskar
Messter (1866—1943) developed the Maltese-cross sys-
tem — still used today in most projectors — to ensure reg-
ular "stop-and-go" motion (Cook, p. 9). This gear, in
the shape of a Maltese cross, sits atop the sprocket wheel
that pulls the film through the projector. A pin on the
edge of the wheel briefly locks with the gear, such that
the film is momentarily (and repeatedly) paused and then
released.

The second predicament with early projection was
figuring out a method to prevent the film from tearing
under the pressure of hundreds of feet of film spinning
and intermittently tugging at the single strip between the
reels (this pressure builds to a critical mass typically when
the film is longer than 100 feet, equivalent to over a
minute in duration). The solution came in 1896 with
the invention of the Latham loop, an extra loop in the
film's path through the projector that absorbed the ten-
sion and facilitated the showing of longer films. Although
filmmakers may not have taken advantage of this new-
found possibility until 1899, when longer films were
introduced, exhibitors and studios did so by splicing
shorter films together to make longer programs. In
1889 Edison's company and others around the world
were taking patents out on projectors, and less than a
decade later, on 23 April 1896, New York City was home
to the first public projection of a motion picture in the
United States. Both European and American audiences
were quick to embrace the new entertainment, flocking

to theaters and then reading about it the next day in their
local newspapers.

There were many key players behind the initial
technological developments of motion pictures. Yet few
of these inventors were collaborating or even envisioning
a common goal; even fewer foresaw the potential for
movies to tell stories, create international celebrities,
and entertain large audiences collectively gathered before
one large screen. Eventually, however, technological
advancements coalesced to match the period's fascination
with mechanized movement. Together they soon offered
up the possibility of the movies as an entertainment form
and a highly profitable industry.

COLOR AND SOUND

Long before Technicolor revolutionized the look of mov-
ies, color appeared in movies through a number of differ-
ent methods. One of the first narrative movie directors,
Georges Melies (1861-1938), known for his early special
effects and camera trickery, used color on occasion to
accentuate spectacle, such as bursts of yellow flame and
the like. In order to achieve this effect, he had individual
frames hand-painted, a laborious and expensive practice.
Tinting and toning were more popular, if only because
the process was easier and cheaper, though admittedly
less dramatic in effect. Tinting involved dyeing the entire
emulsion in one color, so that shots of sky or twilight
would appear blue and fire scenes red, for instance.
Toning, on the other hand, was the chemical coloring
of the silver portions of the image, which changed the
normally black areas of the frame into colored ones. Early
directors such as England's Robert William Paul (1869—
1943) and James Williamson (1855-1933) made exten-
sive use of both techniques, which would continue in
popularity throughout the nickelodeon era and beyond.

In 1908 Charles Urban (1871-1942), an American
businessman and motion picture enthusiast, patented the
first functional color film process, called Kinemacolor.
Unlike later color processes that would become the
standard, this one was a two-strip additive system. In
an additive color process, the camera produced two pairs
of red and green exposures simultaneously, thus requiring
superimposition in the projection of the final product
(Cook, p. 254). Urban and his partners quickly began
making films with Kinemacolor in several countries,
including England and the United States. It was mainly
used on shorter films, which kept the budget down, but
by the early teens it was appearing in longer features as
well. Because of patent litigation and technical problems
with the process, Kinemacolor disappeared several years
later. Additive color methods were generally short-lived
because they required faster shooting, more illumination
and film stock, and tricky equipment for projecting in

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Technology

superimposition, which the exhibitors resisted. In spite of
its brief run, Kinemacolor was very popular in its time
and established the foundation for future color processes,
including Technicolor.

The next legitimate color process was developed by
Technicolor in the 1920s. Herbert T. Kalmus (1881—
1963), Daniel F. Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott had
started the firm in 1915. Like Urban and others from this
period, they began with an additive process, but once
that failed, Kalmus sought to invent a subtractive process
that would allow the colors to print on positive stocks
and thus eliminate the superimposition of negatives. In
1922 Technicolor patented the first such color process,
but the high cost made it untenable for most studios. A
few years later, as talkies were emerging, Technicolor was
using a two-strip subtractive process that attracted the
studios' attention. Warner Bros., the most adventurous
of the five major studios, was one of several companies to
try it out on a limited basis. After several years into the
Depression, however, the high cost again proved prohib-
itive for studios. Making it even less attractive were
deficiencies inherent in a two-strip process, namely the
lack of color range in the product (it had been proven in
the nineteenth century that the full color spectrum could
be achieved with combinations of only three primary
colors: red, green, and blue).

In 1932 Technicolor came back with a three-strip
method that included a "three-color beamsplitter and a
third strip of film, so that each matrix — red, blue,
green — had its own separation negative" (Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson, p. 353). With the aid of a
mirror and prisms, the image was rendered simultane-
ously onto three different emulsion film strips. One strip,
sensitive to green, was placed behind the lens, while the
other two — one sensitive to blue and the other to red —
were back to back on a separate track and at a 90-degree
angle from the first. Because the light was split by the
prism and mirror, so that all three strips could register
the image, shooting in three-strip Technicolor required a
great deal more lighting on the set. Yet the result was a
fuller, richer spectrum of colors on film, as is evident in
the films that featured it, including Disney's animated
Three Little Pigs (1933) and Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937), as well as Gone with the Wind (1939) and
The Wizard of Oz (1939).

With each year, Technicolor improved its color
process, which became faster and finer-grained, offering
richer colors. The process still had its drawbacks, how-
ever, namely its high cost. Shooting a film in Technicolor
could add in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to
individual film budgets, so studios were not ready to
make most or even a quarter of their productions in
color. In addition to the need for more lighting, the

three-strip Mitchell cameras, owned and leased by
Technicolor, were expensive, large, and heavy, making
for difficult on-location shooting. The lack of competi-
tion at this time also made Technicolor more in demand
and thus pricier. Further increasing the price tag, the
company often required that studios rent one of its
trained cinematographers. As director Alfred Hitchcock
learned during the production of his first color film, Rope
(1948), this was not necessarily a bad thing. A notorious
perfectionist, Hitchcock was disappointed with the sunset
sky's red-orange colors, which he felt smacked of a
"cheap postcard." He brought in a Technicolor camera
technician to reshoot the last five ten-minute takes of
Rope. As this story suggests, filmmakers (not merely
directors and cinematographers, but also costume design-
ers, art directors, and set designers, and makeup artists),
long accustomed to black-and-white aesthetics, under-
went a necessary period of adjustment. Three-strip
Technicolor remained the best and only color film
method until it was updated and made obsolete in the
1950s, when single-strip color processes would emerge
and television would provide legitimate competition.
Only thereafter would the industry's conversion to color
be nearly absolute.

Just as the idea of movies in color had its roots in the
earliest recorded history of the motion pictures, so too
did the notion that movies could and should talk to us.
Indeed, as long as motion pictures have been projected,
they have rarely been without sound and even synchron-
ized sound, in rhythm with the images on screen. During
the silent era, live organists, pianists, and symphonic
orchestras accompanied the projection of movies in thea-
ters both big and small. On occasion, live actors would
stand behind the screen to speak the lines. In other
countries, such as Japan, a narrator {bensht) would some-
times provide commentary on the action. By the mid-
19205, however, advancements in recording and audio
technology ushered in the era of "talkies."

At first, synchronized sound systems were often on-
disc, meaning that the film's audio (lines, foley sounds,
and/or score) would be recorded onto a recordlike disc.
Then, as the film projected, a disc player would play the
audio in synchronization with the images on screen. In
the United States, Vitaphone successfully used this proc-
ess in the years after World War I. This method was
flawed, however, and was often unsatisfying for viewers
because the synchronization of sound and image was
tenuous, easily disrupted. Across the Atlantic, German
engineers concomitantly developed a means of recording
the soundtrack directly onto the film, such that sound
and image were truly wed during projection. This
method, which was called the Tri-Ergon Process, con-
verted sound into light beams, which were first recorded
onto the film strip and then reconverted to sound in the

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projection process. In the early 1920s, Dr. Lee De Forest
(1873-1961) was promoting a similar sound-on-film
method in the United States. What gave De Forest the
advantage over his counterparts was his ability to make
sound audible to an entire audience with the aid of his
patented Audion vacuum tubes, which were able to
amplify sound coming out of a speaker without the usual
distortion of the time.

In spite of these early sound-on-film innovations, the
first talkies in Hollywood used a sound-on-disc system
contracted by Vitaphone (owned by Western Electric).
The major studios of the time, including Paramount and
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), were not willing to
take the risk on what would require such a costly over-
haul of production and exhibition equipment. However,
Warner Bros., a small but growing studio, anxious to
compete with the major studios that threatened to
squeeze out smaller competition, gambled by purchasing
exclusive rights to Vitaphone in 1926. Warner Bros,
started by making a program of talkie shorts before
producing two features, Don Juan (1926) and The Jazz
Singer (1927), both directed by Alan Crosland. Don Juan
featured merely a scored soundtrack, so it still resembled
a silent film. Like many films of this transitional period,
The Jazz Singer was part silent and part talkie; it included
several scenes with players speaking, but it otherwise used
a prerecorded on-disc music score. Warner's gamble paid
off handsomely nonetheless: the films did very well at the
box office and only encouraged Warner Bros. — and the
rest of Hollywood — to continue in the direction of
talkies.

By 1929, most of Hollywood had made the conver-
sion to talkies, implementing sound-on-film systems that
allowed for the mechanical synchronization of image and
sound. Much of Europe followed in the year or two after.
Problems abounded during this initial phase of talkies for
several reasons. Since the cameras of this era were so
loud, they needed to be encased during shooting so that
the sensitive microphones on the set would not pick up
their audible hum. This made for a rather static kind of
cinema, particularly in light of the precedents set by the
highly mobile camera work of silent film masters such as
F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) and Carl Theodor Dreyer
(1889-1968). Arc lights, which had become standard by
this time, also were loud enough to be picked up by the
microphones. Hollywood switched soon thereafter to
tungsten light sources, which, according to film historian
Barry Salt, did not overly change the look of the films. In
addition, the industry struggled at first with dialogue,
which often came off as forced, unrealistic, and cliched.
Lastly, the industry discovered quickly that not all of its
best silent stars were able to make the transition to the
age of sound.

As several noted film historians have suggested, how-
ever, these growing pains were relatively few and short-
lived for such an extensive industry-wide conversion. The
industry solved most of these problems in time with
developments in audio and recording technology. For
instance, before long studios were using multiple audio
tracks on films, looping in dialogue, music scores, and
foley sounds during postproduction. Quieter cameras
and more directional microphones also freed up the
camera and increased the quality of sound. By the early
1930s, only a few years since the inception of the con-
version to talkies, directors such as Fritz Lang (M, 1931),
Lewis Milestone {All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930),
and Hitchcock {Blackmail, 1929) were using sound and
dialogue in complex ways, proving Soviet film theorist-
director Sergei Eisenstein's (1898—1948) assertion that
synchronized sound could be employed as audio montage
and/or counterpoint. With the conversion to sound,
purists throughout the world proclaimed that the advent
of talkies would be the death knell of cinema as they
knew it, a singularly visual art. It was not long before film
industries and individual filmmakers silenced these
critics.

THE TELEVISION AGE

In the Cold War era of communist witch hunts and
blacklisting, Hollywood executives had even more press-
ing worries: the imminent death of the studio system and
the meteoric rise of television, which subsequently led to
a drastic decline in ticket sales. To combat the drop in
profits, the studios quickly sought to attract movie-
goers — particularly families — from the living room by
enhancing and exploiting their medium's technological
advantages, namely its relatively large image size and its
color format. Not coincidentally, the 1950s were the first
decade of drive-in movie theaters, stereo sound, wide-
screen formats, epics shot in glossy color, and a full
gamut of movie ballyhoo such as 3-D film technology.

Beginning in 1952, Hollywood began to make the
conversion to color production. As with other sectors of
the movie industry, the government deemed Technicolor
(and particularly its three-strip technology) a monopoly
in 1950. That same year Eastmancolor, a single-strip
format based on Germany's Agfacolor, emerged as a
legitimate and cheaper means of shooting in color.
Unlike the earlier three-strip processes, Eastmancolor
(and other processes similar to it) fused the three emul-
sion strips into a single roll, soon eclipsing the competi-
tion and replacing Technicolor as the most widely used
color process in the industry. Whereas in the 1940s less
than a quarter of Hollywood features were shot in
color, by the 1950s more than half were; by the 1970s,
the conversion was nearly complete. Barring student

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productions and the occasional "art" film intentionally
shot in black and white, movies made since the 1970s
have been exclusively shot in color.

To complement the great rise in color production,
and to increase its drawing power as spectacle entertain-
ment on a grander scale than television, Hollywood
sought to widen the aspect ratio of the motion picture
image. Up until the early 1950s, the standard (or
Academy) aspect ratio of motion pictures was nearly
square, 1.33:1. Since the television screen adopted this
same format, Hollywood had even more incentive to
increase its screen image. The first such widescreen opti-
cal process, Cinerama, appeared in 1952. It was a multi-
ple-camera and multiple-projector system that showed
films on a curved screen, adding depth and spectacle to
the experience of movie spectatorship. (The equivalent

format for today's spectators is IMAX, a two-projector
system that shows movies — many shot in 3-D — on a
giant screen not only wider but also taller than typical
widescreen formats.) The projected image was as much as
three times the standard aspect ratio of a 35 mm movie
image. As with most early processes, however, this one
proved too expensive and burdensome both for those
shooting and projecting the picture. A small number of
motion pictures were shot in this format, among them
How the West Was Won (1962).

In 1954 CinemaScope emerged as the most popular
widescreen format in Hollywood and other parts of the
world. It was one of several optical formats that used
anamorphic lenses, which allowed for a 2:1 image to be
compressed onto a 35mm lens and then converted to its
natural dimensions in projection. In time, CinemaScope

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offered movies in a 2.35:1 format, which greatly widened
the image seen by viewers. Not surprisingly, CinemaScope
was used for epics, westerns, and other genres that were best
suited for landscape shots, action scenes, and general spec-
tacle. CinemaScope became extremely popular with audi-
ences, who were drawn to the heightened experience of
movie watching, and with the studios, which liked its cheap
price tag and ease of use.

A number of widescreen variations became available
during the 1950s and 1960s. Directors such as John Ford
(The Searchers, 1956) and Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo,
1958; and North by Northwest, 1959), for instance,
famously used Paramount's VistaVision. Some film-
makers preferred VistaVision because it produced an
unusually sharp image for widescreen formats, but it also
used twice as much negative film stock as conventional
shooting. By the 1960s Panavision gradually replaced
CinemaScope as the standard format for widescreen cin-
ematography. Non-anamorphic widescreen processes as
well, such as 70mm, were used for popular films such as
Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Cleopatra (1963),
and The Sound of Music (1965).

In addition to changing the way moviegoers watched
movies, widescreen cinema altered the way cinematogra-
phers approached shooting them as well. For many direc-
tors, there was more incentive to shoot long takes and to
reduce the number of cuts. Yet the average length of
shots in widescreen productions was only minimally
longer than those in films shot in Academy ratio. The
majority of filmmakers and cinematographers shooting in
widescreen sought to take advantage of the extra width by
lining up all the characters that could possibly fit in the
frame and by adding more material to the mise-en-scene.
Others, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Hitchcock,
employed their own distinctive cinematic styles when
using the new format. In Le mepris {Contempt, 1963),
for instance, Godard seems to defy the film's width,
establishing off-screen space while using only a fraction
of the frame, and panning, rather than merely fixing
upon, landscapes. For Godard the widescreen provided
a means for compositional counterpoint. Hitchcock, in a
different vein, remained true to his commitment to the
principles of montage and thus cut even his widescreen
films in ways that were not typical for this period. His
great attention to composition, color, setting, and block-
ing are also on display in his later films, many of them
shot using the VistaVision format.

Emulating a pattern in movie technology, stereo-
scopic (popularly known as "3-D") formats were intro-
duced at an early stage in the history of motion pictures.
In 1903 the Lumiere brothers were the first to publicly
screen a stereoscopic picture, L'arrivee du train (The
Train's Arrival). The process was labor-intensive and

highly expensive, however, making it largely unpopular.
The increase in move lengths, due in large part to the rise
of narrative and the star system beginning in the early
teens, only exacerbated its high cost and unpopularity.
Applying the anaglyphic system, stereoscopic productions
required twice as much film stock, as shooting in 3-D
necessitated using a twin-camera method that shot the
same footage on two different reels, one tinted in red and
the other in blue. Once processed, the film strips would
be projected together for an audience wearing special
glasses that had one red-filtered lens and one blue-filtered
lens. Anaglyphic 3-D did not disappear, though, appear-
ing in several European and US productions throughout
the 1920s and 1930s.

By the early 1950s, Hollywood was desperate
enough to overlook the format's imperfections in favor
of its shock value. Several innovations ameliorated the
process, as well, further explaining its enormous popular-
ity during this period. A polarized version of the 3-D
process increased precision, while simultaneously enhanc-
ing the viewing experience. Natural Vision, for instance,
first introduced in 1952, fixed the dual cameras in a way
that approximated the distance between the human eyes.
This made for a more realistic sense of depth than earlier,
less precise 3-D formats. Stereoscopic production and
exhibition boomed for two years (1953 through 1954),
appearing most often in adventure, science fiction, and
horror movies, helping to give 3-D an aura of kitsch.
Among over fifty titles shot in 3-D, its most famous
include Universal's Creature from the Black Lagoon
(1954) and House of Wax (1953). Hitchcock's Dial M
for Murder (1954) and the only musical using the format,
Kiss Me Kate (1953), were both shot in 3-D but were
screened "flat" due to the sudden decline of the stereo-
scopic fad at the time.

Although the 3-D craze faded less than two years
after its boom in the 1950s, stereoscopic filmmaking
practices have reemerged time and again, suggesting their
allure across generations. They returned in the 1960s, for
instance, when a string of pornographic and X-rated 3-D
films enjoyed great box office success. More recently, 3-D
has made a comeback in the digital age of filmmaking.

THE DIGITAL AGE

A renewed interest in film realism influenced motion
picture technology during and after World War II. In
order to afford greater versatility and mobility, film-
makers took to using smaller cameras that could shoot
on location without tripods or heavy equipment. Shortly
after World War II, director Morris Engel (1918-2005),
whose low-budget films shot in New York City would
later influence John Cassavetes, helped Charlie Woodruff

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construct a portable 35 mm camera that prefigured
the Steadicam. By the middle of the 1950s, cinematog-
rapher Richard Leacock (b. 1921) and sound recording
specialist D. A. Pennebraker (b. 1925) innovated a port-
able 16mm synchronized-sound camera that rested on
the operator's shoulder. These light and highly mobile
sync-sound cameras were instrumental in renewing a
movement in documentary filmmaking during the
1960s. Filmmakers such as Shirley Clark, Robert Drew,
and Frederick Wiseman helped popularize the 16mm
cameras, which were famously used in productions such
as Primary (1960) and High School (1968). Thanks to
new developments in film technology, and inspired by
new waves of filmmaking around the world, including
Italian neorealism and cinema verite, handheld cinema-
tography became not only feasible but also popular in
both documentary and narrative movie production.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the Steadicam offered a
new means of shooting handheld while maintaining
steadiness of image. The Steadicam is a mount that
stabilizes the camera by isolating it from all but the
cinematographer's largest movements. In addition to
absorbing shocks from movement, the mount also con-
tinually keeps the camera at its center of gravity. The
Steadicam enabled filmmakers to shoot in tight spaces
and accomplish difficult shots (such as circulars, extensive
pans, and crowd scenes), while providing a degree of
steadiness previously attained only by dolly shots or
zooms. More recently, Hi-8 cameras, camcorders, and
digital cameras have increased personal (and occasionally
professional) handheld filmmaking practices. Director
Martin Scorsese and his cinematographer Michael
Chapman used the Steadicam quite effectively in a
famous sequence in Raging Bull (1980), in which the

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camera follows Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) as he
winds through a throng of fans and reporters on his way
to the boxing ring.

Computer- and digital-based filmmaking technolo-
gies have picked up where the Steadicam left off, allowing
for even greater portability and image steadiness. In
addition, these new technologies are able to heighten
special effects, intermix digital or virtual domains with
live action, convey scale, and reduce the labor necessary
in setting up difficult shots and constructing complex
settings. Indeed, the new age of cinema signals the end
of perforated film strips, 35mm cameras, and editing
methods that have remained largely the same since
motion pictures were born. While many of these changes
are yet to be standardized and institutionalized, the tech-
nology has been around in some form since the early
1980s.

Disney's Tron (1982) was the first movie to include
high-resolution digital imagery, but it did so sparingly.
Several years later, in 1989, James Cameron took the
technology to a new level, intermixing live action and
computer graphics in The Abyss. Cameron proved that
computer-generated imagery (CGI) could add complex
yet realistic special effects while remaining cost-effective
(Cook, p. 955). Cameron's success invited further experi-
mentation with digital technologies. Since the early
1990s, many productions have implemented CGI in
some form. Robert Zemeckis, in Forrest Gump (1994),
blended virtual history (past US presidents, for instance)
with live action. Cameron created digital replicas of
Miami as background in True Lies (1994). In Star
Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace (1999), George
Lucas's crew shot every scene with computer-generated
technology, simulating entire battle sequences with digi-
tally designed extras multiplied to fill the screen. These
effects are especially suitable for action-adventure films,
of course, but they are being increasingly used across
genres to reduce costs and save labor time.

Like previous phases of film technology, the digital
age of cinema has had to weigh the advantages of spec-
tacle with more practical matters of efficiency, economy,
and realism. Digital technology has also resurrected ster-
eoscopic filmmaking. After the success of IMAX 3-D in
the 1990s, James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), a
documentary on the Titanic, and Steven Spielberg's digi-
tally animated The Polar Express (2004) both played on
IMAX's giant screens. Directors Lucas and Cameron
have also explored a new 3-D process in which techni-
cians can render flat films stereoscopic using digital
means. This conversion process would be applicable not
only to newly made films but also to reissues of previ-
ously released movies. The technology is in place for both
the conversion and projection of digital 3-D, but theaters
will need first to make the conversion to digital projec-
tion, which will be the next costly — but perhaps inevi-
table — overhaul.

SEE ALSO Camera; Camera Movement; Cinematography;
Color; Early Cinema; Exhibition; Film History; Pre-
cinema; Silent Cinema; Sound; Special Effects;
Theaters

FURTHER READING

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd ed. New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Dickson, W. K. L., and Anita Dickson. History of the

Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2000.

Salt, Barry. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. 2nd
ed. London: Starword, 1992.

Drew Todd

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TEEN FILMS

The teen film has been a fixture in American cinema
since the mid-twentieth century, yet serious study of the
genre did not begin until the 1980s. David Considine
wrote the first exhaustive study, The Cinema of
Adolescence, in 1985, illuminating many of the messages
and trends contained in films about teenagers. Since then
film scholars have pointed to the ways in which the
Hollywood studios capitalized on youth trends and atti-
tudes through movies that directly addressed the teenage
audience — resulting, in Thomas Doherty's term, in the
"juvenilization" of Hollywood. Others have traced the
evolution of adolescence in American movies in relation
to social and political trends, as Hollywood and inde-
pendent studios systematically developed different youth
subgenres to depict an increasingly diverse array of teen
experiences, the teen film became a formally codified
genre.

EARLY TEEN FILMS

The appearance of actual adolescents in movies was not
common until the 1930s. By that point Hollywood
studios had firmly established their grip on American
culture, and even more so on their contract players. But
they had difficulty in maintaining public interest in
young stars, who inevitably grew out of their youthful
charms. This was the case with one of the first teen stars,
Deanna Durbin (b. 1921), whose success started at age
fifteen in films such as Three Smart Girls (1936), One
Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), and That Certain Age
(1938). Then audiences became disenchanted with her
films, and she retired from acting in 1948 at the age of
twenty-seven.

Mickey Rooney (b. 1920), on the other hand, was
one of the rare performers who retained his youthful
demeanor for some time. His sensitivity was evident in
realistic teen roles in The Devil Is a Sissy (1936) and
Captains Courageous (1937), and he soon grew into far
more prominent roles, showing range as both a cynical
delinquent in Boys Town (1938) and as a plucky musician
in Babes in Arms (1939). But Rooney's most endearing
role was that of adolescent Andy Hardy, a character who
became the optimistic antidote to the disturbing tensions
among America's children on the eve of World War II.
By 1939 Rooney was the number-one box office draw in
the country. In just over a decade, he made fifteen films
as Andy Hardy, with such telling titles as Love Finds Andy
Hardy (1938), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), Andy
Hardy's Blonde Trouble (1944), and Love Laughs at
Andy Hardy (1947). The eleven-year run of these films,
despite their whitewashed mythologies of youth, would be
the most significant depiction of adolescent life in America
until the mid-1950s, and no other teen character in film to
date has enjoyed Andy's durability and popularity.

Other teenage performers who rose to prominence
in the 1930s and 1940s include Rooney's recurring co-
star, Judy Garland (1922-1969) {Listen, Darling [1938],
Little Nellie Kelly [1940], Meet Me in St. Louis [1944]),
and the striking Bonita Granville {These Three [1936],
The Beloved Brat [1938], Nancy Drew — Detective [1938]
and three other Nancy Drew films, and Youth Runs Wild
[1944]). The prevailing moral codes of the time, as well
as the Production Code, dictated that onscreen teens
would be focused on their families, schools, and friends,
rarely displaying any adolescent angst over their sexual
development, alcohol or drug use, or rebellious impulses.

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Teen Films

James Dean in Giant ( George Stevens, 1956), his last film. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

The one controversial topic the studios did feel
comfortable addressing was juvenile delinquency. In cau-
tionary tales like Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Little
Men (1934), the studios showed young people how mis-
chief could lead to much greater trouble. In fact, an
entire series of films was built around this topic, begin-
ning in 1937 with Dead End, which labored to show
crime negatively, even though audiences were enthralled
by its charismatic young characters who openly resent
and combat the gentrification of their neighborhood.
The film was such a hit that Warner Bros, developed
more films around these so-called "Dead End Kids," and
had an even bigger hit with Angels with Dirty Faces in
1938. Universal then took up the series, and in seven
more films over the next four years the studio added new
characters to the mix and dubbed them the "Dead End
Kids and Little Tough Guys." None of these films was as
notable as the first few, but in a curious parallel,
Monogram began a different series in 1940 and later
renamed the gang the "East Side Kids," even though

most of the actors were now in their twenties. This series
produced twenty-two films in six years, and in 1946 the
actors embarked on yet another series with these charac-
ters, now called the "Bowery Boys," who had long since
grown into adults. The series still remained a great suc-
cess for Monogram, which released a remarkable thirty-
one Bowery Boys films through 1953; Allied Artists
carried on the tradition for another sixteen films until
1958. By that time a group that had started out as
troubled teenage outlaws had entertained American audi-
ences for over twenty years.

THE EMERGENCE OF TEEN CINEMA

The output of teen films into the early 1950s was rather
meager, although America's fascination with juvenile
delinquency (JD) never disappeared altogether. In 1949
two significant JD films began to renew interest in the
cinematic subgenre: City Across the River intended to
shock its audience by directly addressing the problem of

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teen crime, and Knock on Any Door further explored the
connected elements of society that breed delinquency.
Yet these films were tame compared to the ephebiphobia
(fear of teenagers) that swept the country in the mid-
1950s, in the midst of the appearance of rock 'n' roll
music and the booming postwar economy.

The Wild One (1953), despite featuring characters
past their teens, was the first in a torrent of JD films,
which became ubiquitous by the end of the 1950s. In
1955 two of the most powerful JD films appeared: Rebel
Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle. Rebel spoke
about current teen tensions in sincere tones rather than
didactic monologues, and, with the death of its star,
James Dean (1931-1955), just days before its release, it
had an automatically profound marketing campaign. The
ensuing veneration of Dean as an icon of young cool-
ness — and his performance as Jim Stark, which embod-
ied that image — made the film an indelible symbol of
youth in the agonizing process of self-discovery and the
forging of identity. Blackboard Jungle used the more
typical scenario of an inspiring teacher who tries to gain
authority over his delinquent charges, although some of
them are beyond reform. The film was significant not
only for its use of rock music, but for its integration of
nonwhite teens into the story, which enabled it to make a
searing statement about uniting against tyranny.

Then followed a plethora of films that dealt with
teenage delinquency and rebellion in alternately crazy
and compassionate fashions. Few of these films, Teenage
Rebel (1956), Untamed Youth (1957), Juvenile Jungle
(1958), Riot in Juvenile Prison (1959), This Rebel Breed
(1960), Wild Youth (1961) garnered even a fraction of
the attention that Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard
Jungle received, and they were for the most part formu-
laic. Most of these films served as fodder for drive-ins and
movie theaters that had difficulty booking films from the
major studios, and the main reason exhibitors continued
screening them was to bring in the lucrative teen crowd.

One studio in particular, American International
Pictures (AIP), was quite adept at attracting that crowd.
AIP began in 1956 and soon capitalized on the JD craze
{Reform School Girl, 1957), and then the beach movie
movement of the early 1960s [Beach Party, 1963), as well
as the youth protest films of the later 1960s {Wild in the
Streets, 1968). In many ways, AIP showed the larger
studios that appealing to the young (especially male)
crowd was the least risky of cinematic options, and
studios have been following that logic to this day.
Although this strategy may have worked financially, it
yielded an abundance of artificial, fanatic, and often
idiotic depictions of teenagers.

AIP can be given only so much credit for establish-
ing specific subgenres of teen films, which were prolifer-

ating at many 1950s studios eager to address adolescent
concerns in whatever way seemed to resonate with youth.
There were by this point at least five styles of teen films
that would persist into the 1960s. Hot-rod movies like
Hot Rod Rumble (1957) or Joy Ride (1958) catered to
teens' fantasies of speed and adventure. The rock movie,
with music that was louder, more sexual, and more
racially diverse than that of previous generations, also
became a great vehicle for exploring teen rebellion.
Examples included Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), Don't
Knock the Rock (1956), Carnival Rock (1957), and Go,
Johnny, Go! (1959). The teen beach movie essentially
picked up where the rock movies left off, with an empha-
sis on music, partying, and sexual stimulation, as in
Gidget (1959), Where the Boys Are (1960), Muscle Beach
Party (1964), and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965). Horror
films appealed to youth as well, likely because so many of
them featured characters dealing with bodily changes,
alienation, and anger, as in / Was a Teenage Werewolf
(1957), Teenage Monster (1958), Bloodlust! (1961), The
Crawling Hand (1963), and Teen-Age Strangler (1968).

The teen melodrama was a category of teen film that
had very little coherence but a nonetheless distinct iden-
tity. These were films that took adolescent conditions
seriously, rather than bundling them together with juve-
nile high jinx or fads. Tea and Sympathy (1956) was one
such film, dealing implicitly with the subject of teenage
homosexuality, of which a seventeen-year-old boy is
"cured" by an understanding older woman. With
Eighteen and Anxious (1957), Unwed Mother (1958),
and Blue Denim (1959), the studios began addressing
the controversial yet not uncommon problem of teen
pregnancy. Teen melodramas became even more relevant
as they became less repressed, taking on further adoles-
cent conflicts: racism in Take a Giant Step (1959);
sexism in Billie (1965); interracial dating in West Side
Story (1961); sex education in The Explosive Generation

(1961) ; mental health in Splendor in the Grass (1961)
and David and Lisa (1962); sexual deviance in Peyton
Place (1957), A Summer Place (1959), and Lolita

(1962) ; and family problems in All Fall Down (1962),
Take Her, She's Mine (1963), and Under Age (1964).
Despite their earnest themes, however, most of these
films did not (or could not) get at the deeper psycho-
logical and sexual issues affecting their characters, and
often offered conservative and shallow solutions to their
problems.

The sexual liberation that found its way to college
campuses in the 1960s found its way to teen films soon
thereafter, as in the devastating Last Summer (1969), a
mature portrait of four teens whose repressed sexual
tensions lead to assault and rape. The Last Picture Show
(1971) also presented surprisingly sexual teens, in a
1950s setting no less, ruefully commenting on the

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Teen Films

JAMES DEAN
b. Marion, Indiana, 8 February 1931, d. 30 September 1955

James Dean's breakthrough came when, in his early
twenties, he gave profound performances playing teenagers
in East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
Before he could thoroughly enjoy the fame these films
brought him, his life was tragically cut short in a car
accident. His final film, Giant (1956), had not yet been
released. Dean's untimely death seemed to assure him
everlasting status as a cult figure for youth.

Dean was born in Indiana but moved with his family to
Los Angeles at the age of five. When his mother suddenly
died four years later, he returned to the Midwest and lived
with his aunt and uncle on their farm, returning to L.A. after
high school in pursuit of an acting career. Taking the advice
of one of his first teachers there, James Whitmore, he made
his way to New York City, where he won praise on stage. In
1952 he was accepted into the prestigious Actors Studio,
where he learned the Method approach for which he would
become well known. As he moved through various plays on
and off Broadway, he had occasional small (uncredited) parts
in films like Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952) and appeared
in television shows such as Studio One (1952—1953) and
Danger (1953-1954). After a lauded appearance in the
Broadway production of The Immoralist in 1954, Dean
earned a screen test for East of Eden at Warner Bros., and
then moved to Hollywood in early 1955 to work on Rebel.

Dean became the first performer in Hollywood
history to earn a posthumous nomination for an Academy
Award®, as Best Actor in East of Eden; the next year, he
became the only performer ever to be nominated for a

second posthumous Oscar®, as Best Actor in Giant. Even
though Dean had only three starring roles to his credit
over this brief period, his image as an emotional,
expressive, and tormented young man soon made him an
icon of his era. Over the next generations, young male
stars tried to emulate his cool tension, affecting his style
and attitude. His legend would be further augmented by
the dozens of biographies written about him and the many
films made about his life. Indeed, there are more films
about Dean than starring Dean, including The James Dean
Story (1957), James Dean: The First American Teenager
(1975), James Dean and Me (1995), and James Dean: Race
With Destiny (1997)

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Giant
(1956)

FURTHER READING

Bast, William. James Dean: A Biography. New York:

Ballantine, 1956.
Dalton, David. James Dean, the Mutant King: A Biography.

San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1974.
Howlett, John. James Dean: A Biography. New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1975.
Riese, Randall. The Unabridged James Dean: His Life and

Legacy from A to Z. New York: Wings/Random House,

1994.

Spoto, Donald. Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean.
New York: Cooper Square, 2000.

Timothy Shary

American conditions of youth throughout the postwar
era, during which sex often seemed an empty experience
and marriage a simulated salvation. Ode to Billy Joe
(1976) was one of the few teen films before the 1990s
that explicitly addressed adolescent homosexuality, albeit
in tragic terms. And in Rich Kids (1979), a boy and girl
attempt to reconnect their broken families by acting out
what they perceive to be adult activities, including
intercourse.

Even as these films were telling teens that contem-
porary romance was nothing but trouble, a number of
films were offering young men a more redemptive image

of teen conditions in the past. Summer of '42 (1971) was
a young male fantasy of sexual validation without linger-
ing responsibility. American Graffiti (1973) enticed its
audience to celebrate the supposed nostalgia of an era
that was only eleven years earlier, before the fun of the
1950s faded into the cynicism of the 1960s. Grease
(1978) also hearkened back to the 1950s, yet avoided
confronting the teen troubles that were so prevalent in
films from that era.

While other films in the 1970s also resorted to
nostalgic depictions of boys navigating manhood, such
as Cooley High (1975) and The Wanderers (1979), films

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James Dean. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

about girls in the 1970s showed them as increasingly
erratic and unstable as they ventured toward woman-
hood. The clearest manifestation of this trend was
Carrie (1976), in which the title character uses her tele-
kinetic skills ultimately to kill everyone around her before
killing herself. The movie became a provocative warning
about the latent power of girls living under oppressed
conditions. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
(1976) presented another homicidal girl, and / Never
Promised You a Rose Garden (1977) endeavored to show
the torment of a teenage girl in a mental hospital. Clearly,
boys were having more fun in their recollection of the past
than girls were in their experiences of the present.

THE 1980s RESURGENCE

Teen films went through a conspicuous resurgence in the
1980s, a time without social upheaval and yet during
which teen experimentation with sex and drugs was on
the increase. Films began to reflect this trend. MTV, a
new and comprehensive system for reaching the teen
market through not only music videos but concerts,
clothing, game shows, live events, and of course commer-
cials, also contributed to the renewed emphasis on teens.

Another key factor in the 1980s spike in teen films
that is often overlooked is the emergence of the shopping

mall. Arcades and food courts replaced the pool halls and
soda fountains of the past, attracting groups of teens, and
the centralization of multiple theaters in or near such
malls increased the number of screen venues and offered
moviegoers greater variety and convenience. Thus the
need to cater to the young audiences who frequented
those malls became apparent to Hollywood, and an out-
pouring of films directed to and featuring teens ensued.
Teens in the 1980s were then able to go to the mall and
select the particular youth movie experience that
appealed to them most, and Hollywood tried to keep
up with changing teen interests and styles to ensure
ongoing profits. More significantly for the audience,
teens were then exposed to a wider range of characters
and situations that directly addressed their current social
conditions, even if many of the films that did so clearly
had puerile provocation as their motive.

Halloween (1978) initiated the new cycle of teen
horror films that would — like the killers they depicted —
rise, die, and be reborn. The film refined the scenario that
future "slasher" films followed: a mysterious figure stalks
and kills teens, all of whom are sexually active, while one
escapes with her life, ostensibly because she is a virgin.
Thus followed similar films, most of which launched
series: Prom Night (1980), Friday the 13th (1980), The
Slumber Party Massacre (1982), and A Nightmare on Elm
Street (1984). In these films, the price for teenage trans-
gressions like premarital sex and hedonism was not pun-
ishment by social institutions like parents, teachers, or the
law, but rather death at the hands of a greater evil. By
the late 1980s much of the teen horror market moved to
home video, where an R rating would have little or no
bearing, and thereafter very few teen slasher movies were
released. However, in the late 1990s the unexpected suc-
cess of the revisionist Scream (1996), along with / Know
What You Did Last Summer (1997) and the sequels to
these films, revitalized the subgenre. Indeed, the youth
horror film may have previously faded because it had come
to rely on unintelligent, unsophisticated young characters.
This was an image of themselves that teens began to reject,
welcoming instead Scream and films like The Faculty
(1998) and Cherry Falls (2000), in which not only the
killers but also the heroes and heroines are smart and
tough.

Many youth films in the early 1980s also began to
feature teens engaging in sexual practices. The majority
were decidedly negative in their portrayals, demonstrat-
ing the complications of sex, as well as the disappoint-
ments, confusions, and potential dangers. The most
common plot of youth sex films throughout the early
1980s was the teen quest to lose one's virginity, as in
Little Darlings (1980), Porky's (1982), The Last American
Virgin (1982), Losin It (1983), and Joy of Sex (1984).
The sex quest film came into its prime with the very

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Teen Films

The Brat Pack (from left: Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall) in John
Hughes's The Breakfast Club (1985). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

successful Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), which
was followed by the even more popular Risky Business
(1983); both of these films promoted new young actors
(Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Cruise) who
would further boost Hollywood's sagging box office.
Despite numerous other films in this vein, the teen sex
quest story line became exhausted, and worse yet, irre-
sponsible given the spread of AIDS and a sudden increase
in teen pregnancies. Hollywood then steered clear of teen
sex for the most part until the mid-1990s.

A major figure in teen cinema of the 1 980s was John
Hughes (b. 1950), who wrote and directed his first film,
Sixteen Candles, in 1984. In addition to launching the
career of Molly Ringwald, the film won critical acclaim for
its hilarious yet often sensitive depiction of a girl's rite of
passage, and Hughes opened up the story by introducing
an engaging cast of supporting characters. His ability not
only to convey the contemporary adolescent experience,
but to do so from a number of perspectives, would become
the hallmark of his teen movies. Between 1984 and 1987
Hughes went on to direct or write six teen films, including
The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and

Ferris Beuller's Day Off (1986). Thereafter, teen characters
in many American movies were shown with a greater depth
of understanding. Hughes also cultivated a troupe of young
stars, later dubbed the "Brat Pack," who populated most of
the important teen films of the 1980s.

A distinctive and socially significant subgenre of teen
films, the African American crime film, emerged in the
early 1990s. These films showed urban black youth fight-
ing for their lives in the face of a racist legal and political
system, difficult family and class conditions, and the
influence of media images of young black "gangstas."
In doing so, they exposed audiences to (male) African
American youth culture and forced them to question the
state of race relations in the nation. These films were
instrumental in reviving critical and financial legitimacy
for teen films, which had declined the late 1980s. Most
chronicles of these films begin with the hugely influential
Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991), although
Straight Out of Brooklyn (Matty Rich, 1991) opened just
weeks before; both films feature young men who are
old enough to know they can change their lives but not
wise enough to know how. Similar films followed: Juice

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JOHN HUGHES

b. Lansing, Michigan, 18 February 1950

The strikingly humorous and often affecting films that John
Hughes made in just the few years between 1984 and 1987
became classics of the teen film genre. Hughes was a teenager
himself when his family moved from Michigan to the suburbs
of Chicago, a move that would resonate in many of his teenage
characters who deal with displacement and alienation, and
often do so in the Chicago area. After attending the University
of Arizona for a few years and marrying his high school
sweetheart, Hughes eventually became an editor at National
Lampoon magazine in 1979, where he met various colleagues
connected to the movie industry, leading to his first produced
screenplay, National Lampoon's Class Reunion (1982). Hughes
soon followed this dubious debut with scripts for the hits Mr.
Mom (1983) and National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

He was offered his first directorial assignment after
penning Sixteen Candles (1984), which wrestled with
teenage torments beyond the prevailing pabulum of the
time, marked by both crass humor and sincere
characterizations. In 1985 Hughes carried the success of
this film into his next two teen productions, the farcical
fantasy Weird Science and the influential adolescent angst
drama The Breakfast Club. By this point, his recurring
actors were labeled the "Brat Pack" and became the most
recognizable young stars of the decade: Molly Ringwald,
Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and
Ally Sheedy. Although Hughes again employed Ringwald
when he wrote the appealing Pretty in Pink (directed by
Howard Deutch in 1986), he then abandoned his troupe,

writing and directing the hit film Ferris Beuller's Day Off
(1986) with other young performers.

Hughes wrote one more teen script that Deutch
directed, Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), which offered
more of the same familiar empowerment to its youth
confronting gender and class conflicts. Hughes moved
away from teen subject matter thereafter, writing or
directing movies that featured younger children in
prominent roles, such as Uncle Buck (1989), Curly Sue
(1991), Dennis the Menace (1993), and the comedy
phenomenon Home Alone (1990). Despite the occasional
success of some of his later scripts, such as 1 01 Dalmatians
(1996), Hughes did not regain his previous fame, and by
2000 he began writing scripts under the pseudonym
Edmond Dant.es. In 2001 he produced a script by his son
James, titled New Port South, yet even its teenage
characters and suburban Chicago setting generated scant
attention for the erstwhile auteur of 1980s teen cinema.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985),
Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off
(1986), Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987),
Uncle Buck (1989)

FURTHER READING

Bernstein, Jonathan. Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage
Movies. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997.

Timothy Shary

(1992), Menace II Society (1993), Fresh (1994), and
Clockers (1995). Yet by the mid-1990s, the moral les-
sons of these films had become worn and the characters
too familiar. These films, action-packed with violence,
did not deny the potent temptation of crime, nor did
they deny race as a factor in the difficulties facing their
young characters. Rather, these films suggested that the
greatest menace is the city itself, where crime, racism,
and death are pervasive.

These films were the first to promote teenage African
American stars with any consistency, yet after the sub-
genre petered out, black performers were again relegated
to sidekick and background roles in the vast majority of
teen films. This would remain the case into the next
decade, when some films began to explore the African

American youth experience beyond urban crime: George
Washington (2000), Bring It On (2000), Remember the
Titans (2000), and Save the Last Dance (2001). Still, there
remain strikingly few films about African American youth
overall; Love Don't Cost a Thing (2003), which features a
black cast, is simply a remake of a 1987 teen film that
featured white characters. Despite the success of many
black actors and films featuring them as well as other racial
or ethnic groups, the industry remains woefully out of
touch and disinterested in exploring the lives and culture
of African American youth.

SINCE THE 1990s

By the mid-1990s, the visibility of teen films clearly
increased from the previous ten years, with successful

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Teen Films

John Hughes. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

television shows providing Hollywood with new teen
stars, and with a renewed comfort in the industry for
handling adolescent issues. Teen films of the mid- to late-
1990s began looking at sexual orientation, gender dis-
crimination, and the postmodern nature of teen culture
in general. In the surest sign of change since the 1980s,
teens on screen began having sex again, and even liking it,
as they learned to explore their sexual practices and
endeavored to educate themselves about the subject.

Curiously, the topic that became the most sensitive,
and then essentially forbidden, was juvenile delinquency.
From the mid-1990s onward, the real-life violence of
numerous school shootings by students made onscreen
teen violence increasingly difficult to handle. With rare
exceptions like Light Lt Up (1999) and O (2001),
Hollywood chose to ignore issues of juvenile delinquency
rather than risk being blamed for encouraging it. One
form of teen film that did take up issues of delinquency
in politicized terms was that based on a new "tough girl"
persona. Films like Mi vida loco. {My Crazy Life, 1994),
Freeway (1996), Foxfire (1996), and Wild Things (1998)
focused on an exhilarating, if not liberating, sense of
rebellion among girls. The roles of many girls in
American movies such as Girls Town (1996), The
Opposite of Sex (1998), Girlfight (2000), and Mean Girls

(2004) began to reflect a potent image of young femi-
ninity. These films and their characters pursued the full
range of girls' identities, ensuring that young women in
cinema will no longer need to derive power from
delinquency.

Films about teenage homosexuality became more
common in the 1990s as well. Most queer youth depic-
tions in the 1990s tended to deal with tensions around
both sexual experience and romantic longing — in other
words, the same tensions that heterosexual teens are
shown dealing with in other films. Early examples
included My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Anything
for Love (also known as Just One of the Girls, 1993); but
the first film to boldly portray teenage characters as
a queer group was Totally Fucked Up (1993), which
remains to date the most complete depiction of a queer
teen ensemble, in this case four boys and two girls. Since
then, the most prominent queer teen roles have been
lesbian characters, raising the question of whether young
male homosexuality is generally more difficult to depict,
or more culturally problematic, than young female
homosexuality. The few movies about gay boys generally
gained less attention than movies about lesbian girls, such
as The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love
(1995), All Over Me (1997), and Boys Don't Cry (1999).
Queer teen characters have also appeared in Election
(1999), But I'm a Cheerleader (2000), LIE. (2001),
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), and Saved! (2004).
Depictions of gay youth have grown increasingly fair and
realistic, though occasionally neutralized by negative
representations in some films (like Scary Movie, 2000).
Films that portray (and even celebrate) teenagers adapt-
ing to gay lifestyles may affect cultural attitudes toward
gays.

After a dormancy of nearly a decade, teen sex in
general returned to movies by the mid-1990s, most
notoriously through the controversial and degrading
Kids (1995), and through other dark portraits like Wild
Things, The Opposite of Sex, Cruel Intentions (1999), The
Virgin Suicides (1999), and Thirteen (2003). At the same
time, Hollywood found itself more comfortable dealing
with the comic and lighthearted aspects of teenage sex-
uality, as was evident in Clueless (1995), Trojan War
(1997), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), and most
successfully, American Pie (1999). For the first time, teen
films were now taking sex seriously not only for boys, but
for the girl characters who want more out of it; the
comical Coming Soon (1999) was a celebration of girls
discovering orgasm, with or without boys. A few other
independent films have continued to represent more
sexually mature and confident girls, such as Real
Women Have Curves (2002) and Raising Victor Vargas
(2002), but these films tend not to reach mainstream
audiences.

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Teen Films

Hollywood has in many ways improved its image
of teens through films that show young people confront-
ing race, religion, body image, romance, drugs, family,
friendships, sex, sexual preference, and crime, all the
while allowing their characters to explore their youth.
Yet many of the most heavily promoted films, like The
Princess Diaries (2001), What a Girl Wants (2003), and
Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), insult the
intelligence of the very teens to whom these films are
directed by giving them the illusion that their troubles are
merely entertaining foibles and not legitimate concerns.
The film industry is still seeking ways to speak to teens at
their own level and exploit them for profit at the same
time. History has shown this to be a difficult balance.

FURTHER READING

Considine, David. The Cinema of Adolescence . Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1985.

Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of
American Movies in the 1950s. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Gateward, Frances, and Murray Pomerance, eds. Sugar, Spice,
and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood. Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 2002.

Lewis, Jon. The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth
Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Pomerance, Murray, and Frances Gateward, eds. Where the Boys
Are: Cinema of Masculinity and Youth. Detroit, MI: Wayne
State University Press, 2005.

Scheiner, Georganne. Signifying Female Adolescence: Film

Representations and Fans, 1920-1950. Westport, CT: Praeger,
2000.

Shary, Timothy. Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in
Contemporary American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002.

Timothy Shary

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215

TELEVISION

The experience of seeing movies is likely to conjure
thoughts of going to a movie theater: the smell of pop-
corn at the concession stand, the friendly bustle of fellow
moviegoers in the lobby, the collective anticipation as the
auditorium lights dim, and the sensation of being envel-
oped by a world that exists, temporarily, in the theater's
darkness. Anyone who enjoys movies has vivid memories
of going out to see movies; the romance of the movie
theater is crucial to the appeal of cinema. But what about
all of the movies we experience by staying in? The truth is
that most of us born since 1950 have watched many
more movies at home, on the glowing cathode-ray tube
of a television set, than on the silver screen of a movie
theater.

It is not often recognized, but the family home has
been the most common site of movie exhibition for more
than half of the cinema's first century. In the United
States this pattern began with the appearance of commer-
cial broadcast television, starting with the debut of regu-
lar prime-time programming in 1948, and has grown
with each new video technology capable of delivering
entertainment to the home — cable, videocassette record-
ers (VCRs), direct broadcast satellites (DBS), DVD (dig-
ital video disc) players, and video-on-demand (VOD).
Over much of this period, watching movies on TV
represented a calculated tradeoff for consumers: television
offered a cheap and convenient alternative to the movie
theater at the cost of a diminished experience of the
movie itself. With the introduction of high-definition
(HDTV) television sets and high-fidelity audio in the
1990s, however, the humble TV set has grown to be
the centerpiece of a new "home theater," which can offer
a viewing experience superior in most ways to that of a

typical suburban multiplex. In fact, with theaters desper-
ate for additional income, going out to the movies now
often involves sitting through a barrage of noisy, forget-
table commercials for products aimed mostly at teen-
agers. In an odd twist, the only hope for avoiding
commercials has become to stay in and watch movies
on television.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FILM
AND TELEVISION

We tend to think of film and television as rival media,
but their histories are so deeply intertwined that thinking
of them separately is often a hindrance to understanding
how the film and television industries operate or how
people experience these media in their everyday lives.
Starting in the late 1950s, Hollywood studios began to
produce substantially more hours of film for television
(in the form of TV series) than for movie theaters, and
that pattern holds to this day. Since the early 1960s, it
has been apparent that feature films are merely passing
through movie theaters en route to their ultimate desti-
nation on home television screens. As physical artifacts,
films may reside in studio vaults, but they remain alive in
the culture due almost entirely to the existence of tele-
vision. Whether films survive on cable channels or on
DVD, they rarely appear on any screens other than tele-
vision screens once they have completed their initial
theatrical release. Given the importance of television in
the film industry and in film culture, why do we think of
film and television separately?

First, when television appeared on the scene, there
was already a tradition of defining the cinema in contrast

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Television

with other media and art forms. Much classic film theory
and criticism, for instance, sought to define film as an
autonomous medium by comparing it with precedents in
theater, painting, and fiction. In each case, the goal was
to acknowledge continuities while highlighting the differ-
ences that made film unique. Within this framework, it
seemed natural to look for the differences between film
and television, even as the boundaries between the media
blurred and television became the predominant site of
exhibition for films produced in Hollywood.

Second, there is an inherent ambiguity in the way
that the term "television" functions in common usage,
and this complicates efforts to delineate the relationship
between film and television. Depending upon the context
of usage, the word "television" serves as convenient
shorthand for speaking about at least four different
aspects of the medium:

1. Technology: "Television" is used to identify the
complex system of analog and digital video technol-
ogy used to transmit and receive electronic images
and sounds. While electronic signals are transmitted
and received virtually simultaneously, the images and
sounds encoded in those signals may be live or
recorded. In other words, the "liveness" of televi-
sion — a characteristic often used to distinguish tele-
vision and film — is inherent in the acts of
transmission and reception, but not necessarily in the
content that appears on TV screens.

2. Consumer Electronics: "Television" also refers to the
television set, an electronic consumer good that is
integrated into the spaces and temporal rhythms of
everyday life. While the movie theater offers a sanc-
tuary, set aside from ordinary life, the TV set is
embedded in life. Initially, the TV set was an object
found mainly in the family home; increasingly, tele-
vision screens of all sizes have been dispersed
throughout society and can be found in countless
informal social settings. As a consumer good, the
HDTV set is also becoming a fetish object for con-
noisseurs of cutting-edge technology — independent
of the particular content viewed on the screen.

3. Industry: "Television" refers also to the particular
structure of commercial television, a government-
regulated industry dominated by powerful networks
that broadcast programs to attract viewers and then
charge advertisers for the privilege of addressing
those viewers with commercials. Using the airwaves
to distribute content, the television industry initially
had no choice but to rely on advertising revenue,
which led to the peculiar flow of commercial tele-
vision — the alternation of segmented programs
punctuated regularly by commercials — as well as the

reliance on series formats to deliver consistent audi-
ences to advertisers.

4. Content: "Television" serves as a general term for the
content of commercial television, particularly when
comparing film and television. Considering the vast
range of content available on television, this usage
often leads to facile generalizations, suggesting that
there is an inherent uniformity or underlying logic to
the programs produced for television.

As a result of the ambiguity involved in the usage of the
term "television," there is no sensible or consistent
framework for thinking about the relationship of film
and television. Instead, a single characteristic often serves
as the basis for drawing a distinction between the two
forms, even though it may obscure more significant
similarities. For example, the common assumption that
television is a medium directed at the home, while film is
a medium directed at theaters, overlooks the importance
of the TV set as a technology for film exhibition.
Similarly, the emphasis on television's capacity for live
transmission obscures the fact that most TV programs are
recorded on film or videotape and that feature films
make up a large percentage of TV programming.

Third, film has enjoyed a prestige that only recently
has been accorded to television, and this status marker
has encouraged people to view film and television sepa-
rately. Every culture creates hierarchies of taste and pres-
tige, and whether explicitly stated or implicitly assumed,
film has had a higher cultural status than television. It has
been a sign of success, for example, when an actor or a
director moves out of television into movies. Similarly,
film critics have enjoyed much greater prestige than any
critic who has written about television. The scholarly
field of film studies, and universities in general, were
slow to welcome the study of television. All of this
suggests that there has been an unrecognized, but never-
theless real, investment in a cultural hierarchy that treats
film as a more serious and respectable pursuit than tele-
vision, and this hierarchy supported the assumption that
film and television are separate media. Of course, any
hierarchy of cultural values is subject to change over time.
When a television series like The Sopranos (beginning 1999)
achieves greater critical acclaim than virtually any movie
of the past decade, it is a signal that values are shifting.

TELEVISION AND FILM BEFORE 1960

By the time the networks introduced regular prime-time
programs in 1948, television's arrival as a popular
medium had been anticipated for nearly two decades,
during which the public had followed news reports of
scientific breakthroughs, public demonstrations, and
political debates. Electronics manufacturers spearheaded

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SIDNEY LUMET

b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 25 March 1924

Sidney Lumet's career began at an extraordinary and
unique moment in the history of American television. For
a few years during the first decade of television, the TV
networks broadcast live theatrical performances from
studios in New York and Los Angeles to a vast audience
nationwide. These ephemeral productions — as immediate
and fleeting as any witnessed in the amphitheaters of
ancient Greece, yet staged in the blinding glare of
commercial television — served as the training ground for a
generation of American film directors, which also included
Franklin Schaffner, George Roy Hill, Martin Ritt, Arthur
Penn, and John Frankenheimer.

Before beginning a fifty-year movie career, Lumet
worked at CBS, where he directed hundreds of hours of
live television for such series as Danger (1950—1955), You
Are There (1953-1957), Climax! (1954-1958), and Studio
One (1948-1958). The craft of directing live television,
invented through trial and error by pioneers like Lumet,
required economy, speed, and precision: concentrated
rehearsals with an ensemble of actors, brief blocking of
the camera setups, followed by intense concentration
on the moment of performance because retakes were out
of the question.

Lumet's approach to filmmaking bears traces of this
formative experience. Unlike many directors, Lumet
begins each film with several weeks of rehearsal in which
he and his actors come to a shared understanding of each
scene, to ensure that the actual production runs like
clockwork. On the set, Lumet works quickly, seldom
shooting more than four takes of any shot. He often
completes a shooting schedule in thirty days or less, and
brings productions in under budget. In an age of superstar

directors who may spend years on a single film, Lumet has
worked steadily, building a career, scene by scene, film by
film, through classics (Dog Day Afternoon, 1975) and
clunkers (A Stranger Among Us, 1992).

Lumet's best films — Serpico (1973), Dog Day
Afternoon, Running on Empty (1988), and Prince of the City
(1981) — are blunt and immediate. What they lack in
formal precision, they make up for in the vitality of the
performances and the conviction of the storytelling. Lumet
can be a superb visual stylist when orchestrating
confrontations between actors in confined spaces, but he is
generally indifferent to the visual potential of his material
and has never seemed concerned with creating a signature
style. His approach to filmmaking, with its emphasis on
preparation, ensemble acting, and an unobtrusive camera
that captures the spontaneity of performance, translates
the values of live television into the medium of film.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Twelve Angry Men (1957), Long Day's Journey Into Night
(1962), Fail-Safe (1964), The Pawnbroker (1964), The
Hill (1965), Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient
Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network
(1976), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982),
Running on Empty (1988), Q & A (1990)

FURTHER READING

Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It: Conversations
with Legendary Film Directors. New York: Ballantine,
1998.

Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary
Vision. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Lumet, Sidney. Making Movies. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Christopher Anderson

research into the technology of television broadcasting,
which was envisioned by them as an extension of the
existing system of radio broadcasting in which stations
linked to powerful networks broadcast programs to home
receivers. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA),
which operated the NBC radio network, dominated the
electronics industry and lobbied heavily to see its techno-
logy adapted by the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) as the industry standard.

The Hollywood studios were far from passive
bystanders during this period. Having already invested
in radio, but seen the radio industry controlled by those
companies able to establish networks, the studios hoped
to command the television industry as they had domi-
nated the movie industry, by controlling networks that
would serve as the key channels of distribution in tele-
vision. The studios also envisioned alternative uses for
television technology that would conform more closely to

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

219

Television

Sidney Lumet. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

the economic exchange of the theatrical box office. These
included theater television, in which programs would be
transmitted to theaters and shown on movies screens, and
subscription television, in which home viewers would pay
directly for the opportunity to view exclusive programs.

The plans of studio executives were thwarted by the
FCC, which stepped in following the Supreme Court's
1948 Paramount decision, to investigate whether the
major studios, with their record of monopolistic practices
in the movie industry, should be allowed to own television
stations. While the studios awaited a decision, the estab-
lished radio networks — CBS, NBC, and ABC — signed
affiliate agreements with the most powerful TV stations
in the largest cities, leaving the studios without viable
options for forming competitive networks. Thwarted in
their ambitions, the major studios withdrew from tele-
vision until the mid-1950s. Theater television died in its
infancy and subscription television would not become a
major factor for years to come.

In the meantime, smaller studios and independent
producers rushed to supply television with programming.
The networks initially promoted the idea that television
programs should be produced and broadcast live in order
to take advantage of the medium's unique qualities. The

networks supplied local affiliates with live programs for
their evening schedules and a small portion of their day-
time schedule, but each affiliate, along with the small
group of independent stations that had chosen not to
join a network, still needed to fill the long hours of a
broadcast day — and there was not yet a backlog of tele-
vision programs available. Television stations looked to
feature films as the only ready source of programming,
and the only features available to them came from out-
side the major Hollywood studios: British companies and
such Poverty Row studios as Monogram Pictures and
Republic Pictures Corporation. The theatrical market
for B movies had begun to dry up after World War II,
and these companies eagerly courted this new market for
low-budget films, licensing hundreds of titles for broad-
cast. It has been estimated that 5,000 feature film titles
were available to television by 1950.

Responding to the same demand for programs,
small-scale independent producers in Hollywood also
began to produce filmed series for television. The most
visible early producers in the low-budget "telefilm" busi-
ness (as it came to be known) were the aging cowboy
stars William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd (1895-1972),
Gene Autry (1907-1998), and Roy Rogers (1911-1998),
but they were soon joined by veteran film producers like
Hal Roach (1892-1992), radio producers like Frederick
W. Ziv (1905-2001), and entrepreneurial performers
like Bing Crosby (1903-1977) as well as Lucille Ball
(1911-1989) and Desi Arnaz (1917-1986), whose
Desilu Studio grew to become one of the most successful
television studios of the 1950s.

By mid-decade, as the television audience grew and
the demand for programming drove prices higher, the
major Hollywood studios discovered their own financial
incentives for licensing feature films to television and for
entering the field of television production. RKO opened
the market for the major studios in 1954 when its owner,
Howard Hughes, sold the studio's pre- 1948 features to
General Teleradio, the broadcasting subsidiary of General
Tire and Rubber Company that operated independent
station WOR in New York. Warner Bros, followed in
1956 by selling its library of 750 pre-1948 features for
$21 million. After this financial windfall was earned from
titles locked away in studio vaults, the floodgates opened
at all of the studios. Soon the television listings were
filled with movies scheduled morning, noon, and night.
The most famous of these movie programs was New
York station WOR's Million Dollar Movie, which broad-
cast the same movie five evenings in a row. New York-
bred filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have spoken fondly
of discovering classic Hollywood movies for the first time
while watching the Million Dollar Movie. In a very real
sense, television served as the first widely available archive

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of American movies, sparking an awareness of film his-
tory and creating a new generation of movie fans.

As the Hollywood studios began to release their films
to television, they also began to produce filmed television
series. Walt Disney (1901-1966) led the way in 1954 with
the debut of Disneyland (1954-1990), the series designed
to launch his new theme park. Warner Bros., Twentieth
Century Fox, and MGM joined prime time the following
year. By the end of the 1950s, Hollywood studios were the
predominant suppliers of prime time programs for the
networks. The transformation was most obvious at
Warner Bros., which at one point in 1959 had eight tele-
vision series in production and not a single feature film. In
order to meet the demand for television programs, Warner
Bros, geared up to produce the equivalent of a feature film
each working day.

While the studios specialized in high volume "tele-
film" productions made with the efficiency of an assem-
bly line, the most acclaimed television programs of the

decade were anthology drama series that offered a new,
original play performed and broadcast live each week. In
the intensely creative environment required to produce a
live production witnessed by millions of viewers, pro-
grams such as Studio One (1948-1958) and Playhouse
90 (1956-1961) served as the training ground for a new
generation of writers (Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose,
Rod Serling), directors (Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet,
John Frankenheimer, Franklin Shaffner, George Roy
Hill) and actors (Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, James
Dean, Piper Laurie, Kim Hunter, Geraldine Page and
many more) who became the first in a long line of tele-
vision-trained artists to make the transition into movies.

FILM ON NETWORK TELEVISION
FROM 1960-1980

Diversifying into television may have seemed risky for a
studio in the early 1950s, but within a decade television
had become firmly entrenched in Hollywood, where the
studios had come to depend for their very existence on the

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Television

income provided by television. Networks and local stations
leaned almost exclusively on Hollywood to satisfy their
endless need for programming. By the end of the 1950s,
80 percent of network prime-time programming was pro-
duced in Hollywood; it had become nearly impossible to
turn on a TV set without encountering a film made in
Hollywood, whether a television series or a feature film.

The most significant development for the movie
studios occurred in 1960, when they came to an agree-
ment with the Screen Actors Guild that allowed them to
sell the television rights to films made after 1948. NBC,
the network most committed to color television, intro-
duced Hollywood feature films to prime time in
September 1961 with the premiere of the series NBC
Saturday Night Movie (1961-1977). ABC added movies
to its prime time schedule in 1962. As the perennial first
place network with the strongest schedule of regular
series, CBS did not feel a need to add movies until
1965. Still, the networks embraced feature films so fer-
vently that by 1968 they programmed seven movies a
week in prime time, and four of these finished among the
season's highest rated programs.

As recent Hollywood releases became an increasingly
important component of prime time schedules, the com-
petition for titles quickly drove up the prices. In 1965 the
average price for network rights to a feature film was
$400,000, but that figure doubled in just three years.
The networks publicized the broadcast premiere of recent
studio releases as major events. A milestone of the period
occurred in 1966, when ABC paid Columbia $2 million
for the rights to the studio's blockbuster hit, The Bridge
on the River Kwai (1957). Sponsored solely by Ford
Motor Company to promote its new product line, the
movie drew an audience of 60 million viewers.

As television became a crucial secondary market for
the movie industry, movies needed to be produced with
the conditions of commercial television in mind. Many
of these concessions to the television industry of the
1960s and 1970s contributed to the impression of the
cinema's superiority. In an era when a new generation of
filmmakers and critics were promoting the idea that film
was an art form, television stations and networks
chopped movies to fit into 90- or 120-minute time slots
and interrupted them every 12 or 13 minutes for com-
mercials. Because of the moral standards imposed on
commercial television by advertisers and the FCC, stu-
dios soon required directors to shoot "tame" alternate
versions of violent or sexually explicit scenes for the
inevitable television version. Studios began to balk when
directors used wide-screen compositions in which key
action occurred at the edges of the frame — outside the
narrower dimensions of the television screen. As a
reminder, camera viewfinders were etched with the

dimensions of the TV frame. Studios also began to use
optical printers to create "pan-and-scan" versions of
widescreen films. Using this technique, scenes shot in a
single take often were cut into a series of alternating
closeups, or reframed during the printing process by
panning across the image, so that key action or dialogue
occurred within the TV frame.

As the cost of television rights for feature films
climbed during the 1960s, each of the networks began
to develop movies made expressly for television. NBC
partnered with MCA Universal to create a regular series
of "world premiere" movies, beginning with Fame is the
Name of the Game in 1966. As the network with the
lowest-rated regular series, ABC showed the greatest
interest in movies made for television. The ninety-minute
ABC Movie of the Week premiered in 1968. As executive
in charge of the movies, Barry Diller (b. 1942) essentially
ran a miniature movie studio at ABC. He supervised the
production of 26 movies per year, each made for less
than $350,000. Among the many memorable ABC
movies during this period were Brian's Song (1971), a
tearjerker about a football player's terminal illness
starring Billie Dee Williams and James Caan that
became the year's fifth highest-rated broadcast, and
That Certain Summer (1972), a TV milestone in which
Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen played a gay couple. By
1 973 ABC scheduled a Movie of the Week three nights per
week. Director Steven Spielberg, whose suspenseful 1971
film Duel managed to sustain excruciating tension even
with the commercial breaks of network television, has
become the most celebrated graduate of the made-for-TV
movie.

As a market for filmed series, theatrical features, and
original movies, television contributed substantially to
the economic viability of the movie studios during the
1960s and 1970s. In fact, the television market inspired
the first round of consolidation in the movie industry, as
the rising value of film libraries made the studios appeal-
ing targets for conglomerates looking to diversify their
investments. As a subsidiary of the conglomerate Gulf +
Western, Paramount became the model for the full inte-
gration of the movie and TV industries in the late 1970s,
when Barry Diller moved from ABC to Paramount,
accompanied by his protege, Michael Eisner (b. 1942).
Paramount produced many of the television series that
led ABC to the top of the ratings in the 1970s (Happy
Days [1974-1984], Laverne and Shirley [1976-1983],
Mark andMindy [1978-1982], and Taxi [1978-1983]),
but also learned how to leverage the familiarity of TV stars
and TV properties to create cross-media cultural phe-
nomena. The signal event in this process was
Paramount's successful transformation of John Travolta
from a supporting player in the TV series Welcome Back,
Kotter (1975-1979), into the star of the blockbuster hits

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979) was the first of several successful films based on the popular television
series. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). The
Diller regime also decided to transform the long-
cancelled, cult-hit TV series Star Trek (1966—1969), into
a movie franchise with Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(1979), which revived the commercial prospects for a
dormant studio property. The Paramount model spread
throughout the industry in the 1980s, as Diller became
the chairman of Twentieth Century Fox and Eisner
became chairman of Walt Disney Studios.

THE IMPACT OF CABLE AND
HOME VIDEO FROM 1980-2000

The fitst three decades of netwotk television in America
represent a period of remarkable stability for the tele-
vision industry. Once the basic structure of the television
industry had been established, the television seasons
rolled past with comforting familiarity. However, the
rapid growth of cable television and home video in the
1980s, followed by a new round of consolidation in
the media industries, disrupted the balance of power in
the television industry and led to the complete integra-
tion of television netwotks and Hollywood studios.

Cable television began in the 1940s and 1950s as
community antenna television (CATV), a solution to
reception problems in geographically isolated towns
where people had trouble receiving television signals with
a home antenna. The turning point for cable television
came during the 1970s, when several corporations began
to disttibute program services by satellite, making it
possible to reach audiences on a national — and eventually
international — scale without the need for local affiliate
stations. Time, Inc. was the first company to launch a
satellite-based service when it premiered Home Box
Office (HBO) in 1975. The service began on a small
scale, with only a few hundred viewers for its initial
btoadcast, but it demonstrated that a subscription service
for movies and special events could be a viable economic
alternative to commercial broadcasting. By the end of the
decade, othet subscription-based movie channels, includ-
ing Showtime, the Movie Channel, and HBO's own
spinoff netwotk, Cinemax, had followed suit. With these
movie channels, and many other new cable channels,
cable service expanded rapidly. In 1978, only 17 percent
of American households had cable; by 1989, cable

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Television

penetration had reached 57 percent. This new market
was a boon for the studios, which benefited from the
increased prices that accompanied the competition for
television rights to recently released films, and also for
viewers, who were finally able to see complete, unedited
feature films in their homes.

Videocassette recorders (VCRs) became a common
feature in American homes during the 1980s. Videotape
was introduced in 1956, but it was initially used only
within the television industry. Its widespread use by tele-
vision viewers awaited the development of the videocas-
sette by Sony during the 1970s. The consumer market
for home VCRs developed slowly at first because Sony
and its rival Matsushita developed incompatible systems
(Betamax and VHS, respectively). The market also stalled
because of a lawsuit filed in 1976 by Disney and
Universal against Sony, charging that home videotaping
represented a violation of copyright laws. The issue was
settled in Sony's favor by a 1984 Supreme Court deci-
sion, and the consumer market for VCRs exploded.
Although in 1982, 4 percent of American households
owned a VCR, by 1988, the figure had reached 60
percent.

As a result of the rise of cable and home video, the
motion picture industry developed new release patterns
that channeled movies from their debut in theaters to
their eventual appearance on television through a care-
fully managed series of exclusive distribution "windows"
designed to squeeze the maximum value from each stage
of a movie's lifespan in the video age: theatrical release,
home video, pay-per-view, pay cable, basic cable, and
broadcast television. By the time a movie has made its
way down the chain to broadcast TV, and is available
for free to television viewers, it has received so much
exposure that it is no longer a form of showcase
programming.

As these technological developments shook the
familiar patterns of the television and movie industries,
a series of regulatory changes governing the television
industry and relaxed enforcement of antitrust laws by
the Reagan-era Justice Department heated up the media
industries, subjecting them to a general trend of mergers
and acquisitions that swept through corporate America in
the 1980s. This climate gave rise to the series of mergers
and acquisitions that saw the Big Three networks change
hands in 1985 and 1986, which will be discussed in
greater detail below. Regulatory changes also produced
a sharp increase in the number of television stations, as
corporations invested in chains of stations. In 1970, of
the 862 stations in the country, only 82 operated inde-
pendently of the three networks. The number of inde-
pendent stations doubled in the 1980s. By 1995 there
were 1,532 stations, of which 450 were independent of

the three major networks. As the number of stations
increased, it became possible to create new television
networks.

In 1985, the media conglomerate News
Corporation, owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch,
purchased Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Then in
1986, Murdoch purchased six television stations which
served as the foundation for launching the Fox Network,
led by former Paramount chairman Barry Diller. Because
Fox began by programming just a few nights each week,
it technically did not meet the FCC definition of a full-
fledged network, and therefore was not constrained by
FCC rules that prohibited a network from producing its
own programs. As a result, Fox served as the paradigm
for a new era in the media industries, with a television
network stocked with series produced by its corporate
sibling, Twentieth Century Fox Television. Programs like
The Simpsons (beginning 1989) and The X-Files (1993—
2002) grew into network hits and lucrative commercial
franchises within a perfect, closed loop of corporate
synergy in which all profits remained within the parent
company, News Corporation.

Pointing to the loophole that Fox had squeezed
through in order to produce its own programs, the net-
works lobbied for an end to the FCC rules that had kept
them from producing programs or sharing in the lucra-
tive syndication market (where programs are sold to local
stations and international markets) since the early 1970s.
These Financial Interest and Syndication Rules were
gradually repealed between 1991 and 1995. The policy
change not only gave networks the opportunity to pro-
duce their own programs, but it also eliminated the last
remaining barriers separating the movie and television
industries. Studios quickly formed new television networks
or merged with existing networks. Time Warner's WB
Network and Viacom's United Paramount Network
(UPN) debuted in 1995 (the two were merged into
the CW in 2006). ABC came under the control of the
Walt Disney Company in August 1995 when Disney
acquired the network's parent company, Capital Cities/
ABC Television Network for $19 billion. Viacom pur-
chased CBS in 1999, and NBC acquired Vivendi
Universal in 2005. In this stage of consolidation, the
boundaries between film and television are certainly
not perceived as barriers; rather, they represent oppor-
tunities for diversifying a media conglomerate's product
lines.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE
OF FILM AND TELEVISION

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the boundaries
between the media blurred, thanks to the convergence of
digital technologies and consolidation in the media

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MICHAEL MANN
b. Chicago, Illinois, 5 February 1943

Michael Mann is roughly the same age as Martin Scorsese,
Francis Coppola, George Lucas, and the other directors of
the film-school generation who revived American
filmmaking in the 1970s, but he is seldom thought of as a
member of that generation, despite the fact he too
attended film school in the 1960s. Like the romantic
loners who inhabit his films, Mann followed his own route
to the film industry. He attended film school in London,
instead of New York or Los Angeles, and while his peers
traveled directly from film school to the movie industry,
Mann detoured through television, where he learned his
craft by writing for the police series Police Story (1973—
1977) and Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979) and then by
creating the series VegaS (1978-1981).

Mann understood the potential for rich storytelling
inherent in the series format and appreciated the creative
authority of the writer-producer in television. In 1981 he
directed his first feature film, the accomplished existential
thriller Thief, yet returned to television to produce Miami Vice
(1984-1989) and Crime Story (1986-1988), two of the most
innovative series in television history. In the tradition of the
great auteur directors of the studio era, Mann burrowed deeply
into an exhausted genre; beneath the familiar facade of the
police series, he discovered the darkest impulses of his age and
his own voice as an artist. Returning to film, Mann hit his
stride at the turn of the millennium, and directing at least two
classics {The Last of the Mohicans [1992], Heat [1995]) and a
number of other films (The Insider [1999], Ali [2001], and
Collateral [2004]) that express his enduring theme — the
challenges faced by a man (it is always a man) who attempts to
live by a personal moral code in a capricious, corrupting world.

Mann spent his formative years in television drama
during the 1970s, when one police series looked exactly
like every other. Yet to accompany his narrative voice, he
developed a powerful personal style that is as evident in his
television series as in his films. When he returned to
television with the unfortunately short-lived Robbery
Homicide Division (2002—2003), he shot the entire series
on digital video (DV). Other television producers and
filmmakers have used DV because it is less expensive than
film, or because it is easier to manipulate for post-
production effects, but Mann discovered the expressive
qualities of the medium's hyperrealism. The television
series turned out to be a trial run for Collateral, which used
DV to transform nighttime Los Angeles into a throbbing,
spectral world. Thanks to a visual aesthetic first worked
out in television, Mann was able to create one of the most
visually striking movies of the time.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Films: Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the
Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali
(2001), Collateral (2004); Television Series: Miami Vice
(1984-1989), Crime Story (1986-1988), Robbery
Homicide Division (2002-2003); Other: ATI — The
Director — Michael Mann (2002)

FURTHER READING

Fuller, Graham. "Making Some Light: An Interview with
Michael Mann." In Projections 1, edited by John Boorman
and Walter Donahue, 262-278. London: Faber & Faber,
1992.

James, Nick. Heat. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Christopher Anderson

industries. Many filmmakers use digital video in place of
film throughout the entire filmmaking process, and it is
only a matter of time before movies are distributed and
projected in theaters using digital technology. The vast
libraries of film and television titles that give the con-
glomerates much of their economic value are being digi-
tized and stored on computer servers. The latest round of
mergers in the media industries has created conglomer-
ates that actively promote cross-media synergy. The
enticement of extraordinary riches for anyone fortunate
enough to be involved in the creation of a hit TV series

means that talent no longer flows from TV to movies;
many producers, directors, writers, and performers move
eagerly between film and television.

The two-way migration of talent between movies
and television first took off in the 1980s, the decade
when the director of a few stylish four-minute music
videos on MTV could find him or herself with a contract
to direct a feature film. Advances in television set tech-
nology and the reduced cost of larger screens made it
possible for viewers to appreciate differences in visual
styles on television. For the first time in the history of

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225

Television

Michael Mann. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

television, competition gave producers and networks an
incentive to create distinctive styles. The proliferation of
cable channels and the habits of viewers armed with
remote controls made a distinctive visual style as impor-
tant as character and setting in creating an identity for a
television series.

When critics praised the groundbreaking crime series
Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) and Miami Vice (1984-
1989) in the 1980s, they spoke not only about the stories
but also about stylistic innovations: the documentary
techniques of Hill Street Blues, the adaptation of a music
video aesthetic in Miami Vice, a series created and pro-
duced by Michael Mann (b. 1943), who moved easily
between TV and movies. David Lynch made a big splash
with Twin Peaks (1990-1991) a series that brought
Lynch's unique vision to television before losing focus
in its second season.

Since then directors, writers, and producers have
continued to alternate between movies and television.
Some directors, such as Oliver Stone (with the mini-
series Wild Palms [1993]) and John Sayles (with the series
Shannons Deal [1990-1991]) have made token appear-
ances in television. Others have served as executive pro-
ducers, including Steven Spielberg (with the miniseries

Taken, 2002) and George Lucas (with the series The
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, 1992—1993). Several
screenwriters have shifted into television because of the
storytelling potential of the series format and the creative
control of the writer-producer in television. These
include Joss Whedon {Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997-
2003), Aaron Sorkin {The West Wing, 1999-2006), and
Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, 2001—2005). There are several
writer-directors who move consistently between film and
television, depending on the nature of the project,
including Michael Mann, Edward Zwick and Marshall
Herskovitz, and Barry Levinson. The most successful
producer in Hollywood during this era may be Jerry
Bruckheimer, who continues to produce blockbuster hits
like Armageddon (1998) and Pirates of the Caribbean
(2003), while his company produces the three CSI:
Crime Scene Investigation television series for CBS.

In order to attract the young adult viewers most
desired by advertisers, television networks must attempt
to create programs that attract and reward a discriminat-
ing audience. In the past, this audience may have been
dissatisfied with commercial networks for interrupting or
otherwise interfering with a drama or a movie, but they
could only dream of an alternative. Today a flick of the
remote control takes them directly to movies and unin-
terrupted drama series available on HBO and Showtime,
collected in DVD box sets, and soon via video-on-
demand — all experienced in theater-quality, high-
definition and Surround Sound. Discerning viewers are
still drawn to television, but they have acquired a taste for
a viewing experience that is increasingly cinematic. In
one portent of the future, the commercial networks have
switched to widescreen framing for quality drama series
like ER (beginning 1994) and The West Wing.

The experience of watching television at home is
becoming more like the experience of watching movies
on a big screen. The convergence of digital technologies
is gradually eliminating the material distinction between
film and video. Media corporations would like to move
to a model of video-on-demand in which viewers select
individual titles from the studio's library. With these
changes on the horizon, it is possible to imagine a time
in the not-too-distant future when the differences
between film and television will be no more than a topic
of historical interest.

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the
Fifties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Balio, Tino, ed. Hollywood in the Age of Television. Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1990.

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Television

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and
Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to
Cable. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Monaco, Paul. The Sixties: 1960-1969. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003.

Mullen, Megan Gwynne. The Rise of Cable Programming in the
United States: Revolution or Evolution? Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2003.

Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the
Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002.

Wasko, Janet. Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver
Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Wasser, Frederick. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and
the VCR. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Christopher Anderson

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

227

THEATER

In its mystery, blends different beauties, sang Mario
Cavaradossi in Puccini's opera, Tosca. Indeed, the saga
of stage and film interaction over the course of a century
has resulted in what historian Robert Hamilton Ball has
called "a strange and eventful history." The two media,
one the inheritor of centuries of dramatic tradition and
the other, an upstart technology bereft of dramatic ante-
cedents, have been linked from the days of the very first
moving picture experiments by Thomas Edison and
W. K. L. Dickson late in the nineteenth century.
Initially, the film medium was presumed to be merely a
vehicle for the dissemination of theatrical events. As early
as 1894, a writer in The Critic predicted that Thomas
Edison's kinetoscope peepshow device could enable the
viewer to "witness and hear shadow plays in which the
only real performer will be the electromagnetic motor
behind the scenes" (p. 330). That same year Edison
himself boasted that in the near future a phonograph
and kinetoscope could be linked together to bring plays
and players from distant stages to the comfort of the
parlor. But before the film medium would prove itself
to be much more than a mere recording device for
theatrical events, there would be subsequent decades of
uncertain and tentative interaction and experimentation.

The first thirty years of theater-film interaction may
be conveniently divided into three periods. In the first,
roughly 1896—1907, pioneering filmmakers in America
and Europe borrowed liberally from vaudeville acts,
operas, dramas, and magic shows for their peep show
and nickelodeon shorts. In the second, 1908-1915, film-
makers and theatrical entrepreneurs collaborated in trans-
lating famous plays and their players into feature-length
theatrical films, commonly called "photoplays." (A "the-

atrical film" designates a motion picture that utilizes the
subjects, processes, forms, personnel, and effects of the
stage in a visible and prominent way.) Third, after a
decade or so, during which the cinema developed as a
commercial enterprise relatively independent of the the-
atrical establishment, the introduction of talking-picture
technology in 1926-1930 saw a resurgence of extensive
theatre-film interaction involving a new influx of stage
stars and a new spate of photoplays.

THE SILENT PROSCENIUM, 1896-1916
Beginning shortly after the turn of the century and con-
tinuing sporadically for the next ten years or so, Lumiere
and Pathe studios in France, Edison and Biograph and
Vitagraph studios in America, the Nordisk Film
Kompagni in Denmark, Svenska Bopgrafteaterm in
Sweden, were among the many production entities
around the world that released film recordings of vaude-
ville turns, dramas (including Shakespeare), operas, and
magic acts. Stage magician Georges Melies' (1861-1938)
made fantasy films that bore the stamp of the French
"feerie drama" tradition, which in turn influenced theat-
rical adaptations in America by Edwin S. Porter (1870-
1941), notably, Jack and the Beanstalk (1902). Charles
Magnusson (1878-1948) was empowered by August
Strindberg (1849-1912) to bring his plays to the
Swedish screen. Popular, operatic, and "legitimate" per-
formers like Victor Maurel (1848-1923) and Coquelin
(1841-1909) in France and John Bunny (1863-1915),
Florence Turner (1885-1946), and Mr. (1863-1919)
and Mrs. Sidney Drew (1890-1925) in America — pro-
ducts of a star system the moviemakers would soon appro-
priate as their own — brought their signature roles,

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229

Theater

opera performances, and stage routines to film (many
of them via proto synchronized-sound technologies
with curious names like "Synchroscope," "Vivaphone,"
"Chronophone" and "Kinetophone"). Shakespeare came
to the screen, courtesy of D. W. Griffith (1875-1948)
and other filmmakers, in a flood of one and two-reel
abridged versions.

As demonstrated by the Edison studio's eight-
minute photoplay Jack and the Beanstalk, which con-
densed the length of the original play into fourteen
single-shot scenes, the screen itself was transformed into
a proscenium stage, a shallow playing space bounded by
the "wings" of the frame borders. A fixed camera posi-
tion in medium distance simulated the spectator's third-
row center auditorium seat. An uncut shot approximated
a scene, and intertitles served as program cues. The action
was blocked laterally in a plane parallel to the camera and
consisted primarily of tableaux vivants. And theatrical
performance techniques carried over to the screen an
exaggerated, declamatory style more appropriate to a
large theater house.

In their operations, some movie studios began to
resemble theater houses. Of course, the use of artificial
light in a theater house was insufficient for the cameras,
so stages had to be built in accordance with the model of
the standard theater house, but with the roofs left open
and side walls constructed of glass to permit sufficient
sunlight. Examples include Melies' "theatre de prises de
vues," a glass-walled studio at Montreuil, France; Robert
Paul's studio in England; and Edison's "Black Maria,"
which had a stage that revolved on a pivot 360 degrees to
follow the course of the sun. According to one contem-
porary account published in 1907, some film studios
were equipped with painted scenic flats, a property room,
dressing rooms, and a completely equipped stage. "The
studio manager orders rehearsals continued until his peo-
ple have their parts 'face-perfect,' then he gives the word,
the lens is focused, the cast works rapidly for twenty
minutes while the long strip of celluloid whirls through
the camera, and performance is preserved in living,
dynamic embalmment (if the phrase may be permitted)
for decades to come" {Saturday Evening Post, 1907, pp.
10-11).

In America alone, of the thousands of titles listed
and described in the compendiums Motion Pictures from
the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, 1894—1912
and the American Film Institute Catalogue: Film
Beginnings, 1893—1910 almost one- third prove either to
be derived from specific theatrical events or to in some
way simulate a theatrical mode. Typical entry descrip-
tions include, "This was photographed as if from the
audience at a theater"; or, "all activity parallels the cam-
era plane"; or, "the set is a backdrop painted as an ocean

scene"; or, "the action consists of participants being
introduced to the audience." One such film, The Critic
(Biograph, 1906), went to extraordinary lengths in its
imitative method: "The camera, placed as though in the
audience, shows several seats with spectators in the
immediate foreground and a box to the right. The stage
acts are burlesques of regular vaudeville acts." However,
it would be a mistake to assume these effects were the
result of ignorance of the more "cinematic" potentials of
the film medium.

Active collaboration between theatrical and film
entrepreneurs began in earnest around 1908. The natu-
ralism of Andre Antoine's (1858-1943) celebrated
Theatre Libre was transferred to the screen via the
Pathe company. The most influential studio operation
was the Film d'Art company, formed in France in 1908.
Actors from the Comedie Francaise appeared before the
cameras in a number of plays, beginning with L'Assassinat
du due de Guise (1908) and continuing with productions
based on plays by Victorien Sardou, Eugene Brieux, and
Henri Lavedan. Film d'Art's prestige, opulent production
values, and theater-house distribution created a sensation
and led to the establishment of similar collaborative
production companies in America and abroad in the next
few years. Famous Players came first in 1912, a collabo-
ration between the eminent Broadway producer Daniel
Frohman (1851-1940) and film exhibitor Adolph Zukor
(1873—1976). The New York Dramatic Mirror reported
in July 1912: "The men back of this movement have
become fully convinced that the time for the amalgama-
tion of the legitimate stage and the motion picture has
come. . . ." (p. 34). Frohman wielded his prestige to bring
Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) in Film d'Art's photoplay
of Queen Elizabeth (1912) to his Lyceum Theatre in New
York City, the initial critical enthusiasm of which led to
subsequent Famous Players productions, such as Minnie
Maddern Fiske (1865-1932) duplicating her stage role in
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1913) and James O'Neill
(1847-1920) reprising his signature role in The Count
of Monte Cristo (1913). Other collaborative theater-
film production companies included the Protective
Amusement Company, which allied the New York the-
atrical syndicate producers Marc Klaw (1858-1936) and
Abraham L. Erlanger (1860-1930) with the forces of the
Biograph studio for the purpose of filming, among other
properties, plays by Henry C. De Mille (1853-1893) and
David Belasco (1853-1931); the Jesse L. Lasky Feature
Play Company, which brought together theater promoter
Jesse L. Lasky (1880-1958) with filmmaker Cecil B.
DeMille (1881-1959) to adapt stage plays by David
Belasco (1853-1931); the World Film Corporation,
formed by stage entrepreneurs the Shubert brothers and
William A. Brady (1863-1950) and filmmaker Lewis J.
Selznick (1870-1933) to adapt plays by Edward Sheldon

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HAROLD PINTER

b. London, England, 10 October 1930

Harold Pinter has said that his works begin with an image,
rather than a theme, and that he is a visual writer. It is not
surprising, then, that he has found success working in film.
Although Pinter — winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for
Literature — is primarily known as a playwright, with many
of his plays regarded as masterpieces of the English stage,
he has also had a long and celebrated career writing for
both film and television.

Pinter's screenplays are all adaptations of other works:
his own plays, including The Birthday Party (1968) and
The Homecoming (1969); other people's plays (Butley,
1974); and novels written by others, including F. Scott
Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (1976), John Fowles's The
French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Ian McEwan's The
Comfort of Strangers (1990), and Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale (1990). His screenplays have won
numerous awards and critical praise. They have also
increasingly been the focus of his professional attention,
and since the 1980s he has written more film and
television screenplays than he has plays.

Pinter's interest in film began at an early age. At
fourteen, he joined a local film club, and later he argued
the merits of motion pictures as a member of his school's
debating society. In the early 1960s he was commissioned
by the BBC to write several radio and television scripts,
and a number of his early plays appeared on television as
well as on stage. His first screenplay, an adaptation of his
play The Caretaker, was filmed in 1963. Pinter was
immediately drawn to the technical opportunities afforded
by motion pictures, especially the ability to use and
manipulate time and space for dramatic effect. He also
found the close-up to be an effective way of conveying
conflict and drama without unnecessary dialogue, and has
commented on the usefulness of editing as a way of

creating meaning visually. The subtle complexities of
his plays, in which a pause carries as much meaning as
spoken dialogue, translate well to the screen. Just as
the themes and structures of Pinter's plays have
affected his screenplays, he has also used filmic
techniques on stage, including the use of a voice-over
in Mountain Language (1988), and lighting that
simulates cutting between shots in Party Time (1991).

Pinter's films tend to be driven by character rather
than plot, focusing on human relationships. They deal
with many of the same themes that his plays do,
including struggles for power and domination, the
complex workings of time and memory, and the fear of
a menacing unknown. These themes are present in the
films he has adapted from other people's work as well
as those he has adapted from his own plays.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Caretaker (1963), The Servant (1963), The Pumpkin
Eater (1964), The Go-Between (1970), The Homecoming
(1973), The Last Tycoon (1976), The French Lieutenant's
Woman (1981), Betrayal (1983), The Comfort of Strangers
(1990), The Handmaid's Tale (1990)

FURTHER READING

Gale, Steven H. Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the
Artistic Process. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2003.

, ed. The Films of Harold Pinter. Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2001.

Pinter, Harold. Collected Screenplays, 3 vols. London: Faber &
Faber, 2000.

Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter.
Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.

Kristen Anderson Wagner

(1886-1946) and Clyde Fitch (1865-1909); and the
Triangle Film Corporation, which imported dozens of
prominent stage performers from New York to the Los
Angeles film studios of D. W. Griffith.

The enthusiasm that greeted these photoplays and
starring vehicles was short-lived. Voices that hailed them
as priceless artifacts, documentations of the history of
theatrical forms and performances, soon grew silent,

replaced by complaints that they were hybrid monstros-
ities that were neither theatrical nor cinematic. As early as
1914 prominent American critics like Louis Reeves
Harrison were complaining that these filmmakers were
ignoring the creative possibilities of their own medium,
"for screen visualization is an entirely different art, at its
best when freed from the artificial limitations imposed by
dramatic construction for stage performance" (p. 185).

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

231

Theater

Harold Pinter during the filming o/"Betrayal (David Jones,

1983). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

That same year several filmmakers published a series of
critical attacks on photoplays in the New York Dramatic
Mirror. Two years later, in 1916, appeared two pioneer-
ing works on film theory and aesthetics, Vachel Lindsay's
The Art of the Moving Picture and Hugo Munsterberg's
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. Lindsay and
Munsterberg were not denying the validity of theatrical
adaptation in theory; rather, they objected to a trans-
lation process that was so closely imitative it denied any
cinematic intervention or enhancement of the theatrical
material. For example, Lindsay savaged Queen Elizabeth,
saying it "might be compared to watching [a play] from
the top gallery through smoked glass, with one's ears
stopped with cotton" (p. 185). By contrast, he praised
Griffith's Biblical epic, Judith of Bethulia (1914) as an
example of a theatrical entertainment that had been
"overhauled" by the "explosive power" of close-ups and
editing and the narrative displacement of the continuities
of time and space. "The photoplays of the future will be
written from the foundations for the films," Lindsay
predicted. "The soundest actors, photographers, and pro-
ducers will be those who emphasize the points wherein
the photoplay is unique" (p. 197).

The ticket-buying consumers seemed to agree. Most
of the photoplays of 1912 to 1915 ultimately failed at the
box office. The posturing of most of the stage-trained
actors before the cameras had proven inferior to the
greater subtlety of players who had begun their training
before the cameras. For every Douglas Fairbanks and
William S. Hart, who found greater success in the movies
than on the stage, there were dozens of others, such as Sir
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, William Gillette, and the com-
edy team Joe Weber and Lew Fields, who hastily
retreated back to the stage they had forsaken.

THE NEW PROSCENIUM SPEAKS, 1926-1930

Yet, despite an intense period of maturation in the teens
and twenties that saw the development of silent theatrical
films displaying the unique propensities of the film
medium, the talking picture revolution that began in
the mid-twenties with experiments by Warner Bros, and
Fox in America, Gaumont-British in England, and
Tobis-Klangfilm in Europe initiated yet another spate
of closely imitative theater-film collaborations. In the
early thirties in France, many theatrically-oriented theater
playwrights and directors, such as Rene Clair (1898—
1981), Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) and Sacha Guitry
(1885-1957), filmed their own plays and/or staged their
stories along theatrical models — notably Clair's operetta-
like Le Million (1931), Pagnol's Marius-Fanny-Cesar tril-
ogy (1931—1936) and Guitry's Faisons un reve {Let Us
Do a Dream, 1937) and Le Roman d'un tricheur {The
Story of a Cheat, 1936). Germany's storied Ufa studios
(Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) in Babelsberg was
the site for numerous early 1930s musical extravaganzas,
notably Der Kongref Tanzt (Congress Dances) in 1931.
In America in the late 1920s, Daniel Frohman and
Adolph Zukor joined forces again, this time to collabo-
rate on Paramount's Interference (1928), the first all-
talking theatrical feature film. In a virtual repeat of their
earlier pronouncements, they proclaimed a new era in
theater-film cooperation. "No more will our best plays be
confined to the few big cities," declared Frohman, speak-
ing from the screen. "These plays, with their stirring
drama enhanced by the richness of the human voice, will
go to the whole world." By 1930 hundreds of film
records of short vaudeville sketches, feature-length
dramas, revues, and musical shows were once again
flooding the movie houses. Actors with stage-trained
voices forsook the stage and flocked to the East and
West coast movie studios to face the dreaded "King
Mike" (the label alluding to the primitive microphone
technology of the day). Variety estimated that more than
205 stage personnel were working in the East and West
Coast studios, including fifty-one playwrights, seventeen
stage and dance directors, and ninety-five actors.

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Theater

The most extensive collaborative endeavor at this
time was Paramount's construction of sound stages in
Astoria, New York, for the purpose of bringing nearby
Broadway performers, directors, and producers as various
as Fanny Brice (1891-1951), Rouben Mamoulian
(1897-1987), and Florenz Ziegfeld (1867-1932) to the
screen in their current stage successes. The years 1929
and 1930 saw theater and film directors work side by side
in the filming of the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts (1929),
The Dance of Life (1929, based on the play Burlesque),
The Doctor's Secret (1929, based on James Barrie's Half
an Hour), and many others. Warner Bros., in addition to
bringing Broadway stars like Al Jolson to the screen and
constructing a sound stage of its own in New York for
theatrical adaptations — of its approximately one hundred
talkies and part- talkies released by 1930, fully one-third
were theatrically related — went into partnership with the
Shubert brothers to finance stage productions in order to
acquire advance film rights. This promised a double
benefit to Warner — a ready-made supply of theatrical
properties and a chain of legitimate houses in which to
exhibit them. "An offer nowadays by a picture firm to
bankroll a stage producer is very common," Variety
reported on September 19, 1928. "The dialogue picture
maker calculates it could produce a stage play, erect
prestige for it by a Broadway run, and [photograph] the
play, sending it on the road, but in the picture houses"
(p. 5). (This move was later terminated on legal grounds
by the Dramatists Guild.) "I believe that the plays I was
doing in the theatre might be looked upon as 'high-
brow,'" opined prominent Broadway actor George Arliss
(1868-1946), who brought his Disraeli to the screen
in 1929; "[and] there is no doubt that a considerable
percentage of the people that came to see me in the theatre
never went to the movietones [sic] at all. . . . The Warner
Brothers realized that these lost sheep must be collected
and brought into the fold. . . ." (p. 12).

To a significant degree, many of these theatrical
shorts and features continued the tradition of close imi-
tation of stage properties that had been seen — and sub-
sequently abandoned — in silent photoplays. Whereas in
the silent days this imitation had been largely a matter of
intent, now it was a technical expedient. The cramped
confines of the early sound stages and the limitations of
the primitive microphones led at first to a "canned"
product that was static and lifeless. Just as critiques of
the silent films had included complaints that dialogue
and expository titles retarded the action and that exag-
gerated acting styles jarred with the intimacy of the
camera lens, now foes of the talkie photoplays rejected
the audio-visual pleonasm of the synchronous union of
image and sound, the "long photographic discussions
between characters" and action that "had a repeated
tendency to become too talkie and motionless."

Variety's complaint in a review dated 13 March 1929
about The Letter (1929), in which Jeanne Eagels (1894-
1929) recreated her stage role, that the film was "entirely
a transcription of a stage work and the cinema version
does little to make the subject matter its own" (p. 14)
was typical. Writing in the New York Times, 28 July
1929, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)
argued that in trying to transform itself into a theatrical
event, films could never become more than a "bad pho-
tographic and mechanical copy" of a given play. And,
as had happened before, several important theoretical
works appeared addressing the new challenges to theatri-
cal and cinematic identity. Joining Pirandello were Sergei
Eisenstein (1898-1948) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-
1953) in Russia, Abel Gance (1889-1981) and Rene
Clair in France, and Edmund Goulding (1891-1959)
and George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) in America.

And, as had happened fifteen years earlier, the ticket-
buying public in America again seemed to agree. By 1 930
they were turning away from tedious, stage-bound adap-
tations such as The Letter in favor of films like
Mamoulian's Applause (1929), an original screenplay that
blended theatrical elements with a more cinematic non-
synchronous conjunction of image and sound. And while
they embraced several of the new stage-trained actors,
notably Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Edward G.
Robinson, and the Marx Brothers, they dismissed many
more, such as Ruth Chatterton and Hal Skelly.

BREAKING THE NEW PROSCENIUM

It is a mistake to regard this thirty-year period as primar-
ily a series of misguided intentions and artistic and com-
mercial failures for both the theater and cinema
establishments. Quite the contrary. Not only did thou-
sands of plays and players reach a public to which they
would otherwise have been unavailable, but the conse-
quences of these collaborations resulted in a reassessment
of each medium's artistic and commercial priorities and
an exploration of alternative modes of expression. The
appearance of Queen Elizabeth in France and Cecil B.
DeMille's The Squaw Man (adapted from the play by
Edwin Milton Royle, 1914) in America spearheaded the
acceptance of feature-length films and attracted the atten-
tion of important dramatic critics. Moreover, these
attempts at close theatrical imitation, lamentable as they
might have seemed, served to throw into even higher
relief the unique effects and propensities of the film
medium. When the otherwise stagebound The Count of
Monte Cristo displayed a few scenes in natural locales,
audiences applauded. Likewise, the Belasco plays adapted
by DeMille and the Lasky Feature Play Company held
out possibilities for exterior filming that could not be
realized on stage but which could be fully exploited on

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

233

Theater

Stage star Helen Morgan in Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (1929). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

film, thereby encouraging more filmmakers to quit the
confines of the studio and shoot in natural locations.

Conversely, the theater's confrontation with the
photographic realism of the cinema presented it with
several alternatives. On the one hand, turn-of-century
playwrights such as David Belasco and Eugene Walter
(1874-1941) produced plays that attempted to rival the
film spectacle (The Girl of the Golden West, 1905; film
version 1915) and the intimate drama {The Easiest Way,
1909; film version 1917). On the other hand, as if in
recognition of the folly of this sort of rivalry, the anti-
realist movement, which had already begun in Europe in
the 1880s with the symbolist theater of Stephane
Mallarme (1842-1898) and Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862-1949) at the Theatre d'Art and the Theatre de
l'Oeuvre, gained headway in the new century in Paris
with the experiments of Jacques Copeau's Theatre du
Vieux Colombier, in Russia with Nikolai Evreinov

(1879-1953) and Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1942) at
the Moscow Art Theatre, and in Germany with the
expressionist theater of Ernst Toller (1893-1939) (Man
and the Masses) and Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) (the
"Gas" Trilogy), in Italy with the Futurist "synthetic
drama" of Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944) (Feet and
They Are Coming, 1915) and in America with the expres-
sionist-influenced works by Elmer Rice (1892-1967)
(The Adding Machine, 1923), John Howard Lawson
(1895-1977) (Processional, 1924), and Eugene O'Neill
(1888-1953) (The Emperor Jones, 1920 and The Hairy
Ape, 1922). O'Neill was only one of many playwrights
and producers who were outspoken in their rejection of
cinema, referring to it as "holding the family Kodak up
to ill-nature." He wrote, "We have taken too many
snapshots of each other in every gracious position; we
have endured too much the banality of surfaces" (Cargill,
p. 525).

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Theater

TONY RICHARDSON

b. Cecil Antonio Richardson, Shipley, Yorkshire, England, 5 June 1928,

d. 14 November 1991

Stage and screen director Tony Richardson was a major
shaping influence in British theater and film during the
1950s and 1960s. Born the only child of a pharmacist in
the West Riding region of Yorkshire, he was educated at
Ashville College, Harrogate, and Wadham College,
Oxford. After earning a B.A. in English Literature in
1951, he enrolled in the Director Training Program at the
British Broadcasting Corporation. During the next four
years he not only directed several notable television
productions, including Shakespeare's Othello (1955), but
completed his first film, a short independent documentary
called Momma Don't Allow (1955), which helped
inaugurate the iconoclastic Free Cinema movement.

Richardson brought this rebellious attitude to the stage
when he and George Devine co-founded the English Stage
Company and its performing arm, the Royal Court
Theatre, in 1956 and promptly discovered British
playwright John Osborne, whose bitterly sardonic attacks
on social and political mores in Look Back in Anger (film
1956, 1958) and The Entertainer (film 1957, 1960)
revolutionized virtually overnight the face of contemporary
British theater. Richardson adapted both plays to the screen
for his own production company, Woodfall Films.

For the rest of his career, Richardson continued to
divide his energies between the stage and screen in both
Europe and Hollywood. His theatrical projects included
Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (film 1960, 1961) and
a groundbreaking version of Hamlet at the Roundhouse
Theater in Camden Town (both of whom he later adapted
to the screen). But it is his screen work upon which
Richardson's reputation primarily rests today. His movies
may be divided into three groups — his literary adaptations
{Tom Jones, 1963; A Delicate Balance, 1973; The Hotel
New Hampshire, 1984); his original films (The Charge of
the Light Brigade, 1968; The Border, 1982; and Blue Sky,
1994); and his television projects (A Subject of Scandal and

Concern, 1960; Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun,
1988).

"Perfection is not an aim," proclaimed Richardson
about his work in Free Cinema and in the theater. "We
reserve the right to fail." For awhile, those brave words
fueled the brilliant experiments of his early career.
However, his stubborn and unpredictable individuality,
coupled with a penchant for spontaneity and a zest for
bizarre humor, led to the erratic achievements of his later
years. Critics savaged the caricatured humor of The Loved
One (1965), the alleged pompousness of A Delicate
Balance and the grotesquerie of Hotel New Hampshire.

Richardson's last film, Blue Sky, an indictment of
American nuclear testing, was well received. However,
the accolades came too late. Completed in 1990, the
film was shelved for almost five years before its release.
Richardson, in the meantime, had died from
complications of AIDS in 1991.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Mama Don't Allow (1955), Look Back in Anger (1958),
The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Tom
Jones (1963)

FURTHER READING

Osborne, John. Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Vol.

II, 1955-1966. London: Faber & Faber, 1991.
Radovich, Don. Tony Richardson: A Bio-Bibliography .

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Richardson, Tony. The Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir.

New York: Morrow, 1993.
Walker, Alexander. Hollywood, UK: The British Film Industry

in the Sixities. New York: Stein and Day, 1974.

Welsh, James M., and John C. Tibbetts, eds. The Cinema of
Tony Richardson: Essays and Lnterviews. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1999.

John C. Tibbetts

Ironically, many of these antirealistic or anti-
naturalistic alternatives found their roots, or at least their
parallels, in cinematic precedents. Pudovkin compared
Meyerhold's experiments in fractured scenes with the

montage practices of film. Munsterberg related the
non-linear sequencing in several plays to cinematic
flashback techniques. O'Neill confessed that a viewing
of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

235

Theater

Tony Richardson during the production of Hamlet (1969).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Dr. Caligari, 1920) — itself a cinematic record of German
expressionist theater — "sure opened my eyes to wonder-
ful possibilities I had never dreamed of before." Motion
pictures as much as antirealist theater directly influenced
the stage work of other American playwrights, like Rice
and Lawson.

Meanwhile, motion pictures were being incorpo-
rated into stage presentations as early as 1896 when,
according to the North American Review, projected
films were utilized as scenic "backdrops." Writing
in the September 1896 issue, George Parsons
Lathrop speculated that the movies could render
"painted scenery unnecessary in plays performed by
flesh-and-blood actors" and "heighten theatrical ver-
isimilitude" (p. 377). Before turning exclusively to
film production, stage magician Melies incorporated
film footage into his platform performances at the
Theatre Municipal du Chatelet and the Olympia
Theatre. This practice was carried forward by
German entrepreneur Erwin Piscator (1893-1966),
who not only incorporated newsreels into his plays,
notably Hurrah, We Live! (1927), but boldly called
upon producers and writers to use films to provide

atmosphere, such as lighting effects and moving back-
drops, that would help to overcome the static illusion
of the stage.

PROMINENT STAGE AND SCREEN ARTISTS

A century of theater-film interaction has seen many stage-
trained directors, writers, and performers whose motion
pictures bear the traces of their theatrical experience and
sensibilities. In the silent period, David Wark Griffith
quit the life of an itinerant player to score a spectacular
success in the burgeoning film industry with smash hits
The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Way Down East (1920)
(both based on stage plays) in America. Mauritz Stiller
(1883-1928) and Victor Sjostrom (1879-1960) quit the
stage to make popular films like Erotikon (1920) and
Korkarlen {The Phantom Carriage, 1921), respectively,
for the Svenskfilmindustri in Sweden. Maurice
Tourneur (1876-1961) left the French independent
theater entrepreneur Andre Antoine (1858-1943) to
come to America and direct the Mary Pickford vehicles
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Pride of the Clan
(1917). After working with Max Reinhardt's (1873-
1943) Deutsches Theater, Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947)
emigrated to America where he inaugurated the modern
sophisticated sex farce with The Marriage Circle (1924)
and Lady Windemere's Fan (1925). Sergei Eisenstein's
experience with Vsevelod Meyerhold and the Moscow
Art Theatre led to his revolutionary agit-prop films like
Bronenosets Potyomkin {Battleship Potemkin, 1925).

The coming of sound brought to the screen a fresh
crop of stage-trained directors who went on to make
many popular films either adapted from plays or at least
consistently displaying a theatrical sensibility. Some, like
George Cukor (1899-1983) and James Whale (1896-
1957), turned their backs on the stage in 1929 and
devoted the rest of their careers to cinema. Others moved
with equal success between theater and film. Rouben
Mamoulian shifted effortlessly from premiere Broadway
productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! to cine-
matic classics Applause (1929), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1931), and Love Me Tonight (1932). Orson Welles's
(1915—1985) notoriety with the Mercury Theater pro-
ductions in the mid- 1930s led to an invitation from
RKO to Hollywood, where, in addition to directing the
groundbreaking Citizen Kane (1941) he made several
Shakespearean adaptations, including Macbeth (1948)
and The Tragedy of Othello (1952). After co-founding
the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and instituting its
famous "method" acting techniques, Elia Kazan (1909-
2003) directed some of his greatest stage success for the
screen, notably A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Sidney
Lumet's (b. 1924) background in New York's Yiddish
Art Theatre led to directing television dramas in the early

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Theater

1950s and his breakthrough film, Twelve Angry Men
(1957).

In England, the success of the Royal Court Theatre
in the 1950s spurred Tony Richardson (1928-1991),
Karel Reisz (1926-2002), and Lindsay Anderson
(1923-1994) to bring to the screen adaptations of plays
by a new generation of playwrights of the time, such as
Look Back in Anger (1958) and The Entertainer (1960),
by quintessential "angry young man" John Osborne
(1929-1994). In Italy, before he directed the landmark
Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Vittorio De
Sica (1901-1974) was a popular stage actor — a profes-
sion he continued to practice between subsequent direct-
ing assignments. Similarly, actor Laurence Olivier
(1907-1989) not only enjoyed a long career in the
movies and also brought Shakepeare's Henry V (1944),
Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955) to the screen.
More recently, Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960) has continued
Olivier's legacy with a dual career in theater and film,
directing Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing
(1993). Italians Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) and

Franco Zeffirelli (b. 1923) have maintained dual careers
in opera and film, occasionally bringing their own stage
versions to the screen. And, of course, in Sweden Ingmar
Bergman (b. 1918) continued to work steadily in theater,
opera, and film. His film adaptation of Mozart's The
Magic Flute (1975) remains one of cinema's most tran-
scendent theatrical adaptations.

Many of today's foremost playwrights have also
worked extensively, with varying degrees of success, in
both theater and film. Clifford Odets (1906-1963), the
best known of America's social protest playwrights in the
1930s, shifted uneasily between Harold Clurman's
Group Theatre, for which he wrote Waiting for Lefty
and Awake and Sing! (both 1935), and Hollywood.
Although well paid for his film scripts for None but the
Lonely Heart (1944), Humoresque (1946), Deadline at
Dawn (1946), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), he hated
his work in cinema. However, his Hollywood experiences
did inspire one of his strongest plays, The Big Knife
(1949), which was adapted to the screen in 1955 by
Robert Aldrich. In England, Harold Pinter (b. 1930),

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

237

Theater

John Osborne (1929-1994), David Hare (b. 1947), and
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) have written many screenplays,
including adaptations of their own works — respectively,
Butley (1974), Look Back in Anger (1958), Plenty (1985),
and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). The
American playwright who most parallels their careers is
David Mamet (b. 1947), who has directed several origi-
nal screenplays, including House of Games (1987) and his
own adaptations of classic plays, such as Terence
Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (1999). Two stage-trained
directors, Sam Mendes (b. 1965) and Julie Taymor
(b. 1952), have demonstrated a distinctive flair for the
cinema, respectively, directing the Oscar®-winning feature
American Beauty (1999) and Titus (2000), a wildly post-
modernist adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Undaunted by the restrictions of the proscenium
stage and wholly cinematic in their vision of the theatri-
cal translation to film, these new directors and writers
were poised at the beginning of the twenty-first century
to carry forward the tradition of intelligent dramatic
adaptation. Doubtless, the advancements of 3-D and
digital technology will bring new challenges to the pro-
cess that will continue to redefine the very nature of that
relationship.

SEE ALSO Acting; Adaptation; Collaboration; Early
Cinema; Silent Cinema

FURTHER READING

Allen, John C. Vaudeville and Film, 1895—1915: A Study in
Media Interaction. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Original
edition published in 1977.

Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange
Eventful History. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968.

Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Cinema: Stage
Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Brockett, Oscar G., and Robert R. Findlay. Century of Innovation:
A History of European and American Theatre and Drama Since
1870. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Brownlow, Kevin. Hollywood: The Pioneers. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Fell, John. Film and the Narrative Tradition. Norman: University

of Oklahoma Press, 1974.
"The Fine Arts: The Kinetoscope." The Critic 24, no. 638 (12

May 1894): 330.

Grau, Robert. The Stage in the Twentieth Century. New York:
Broadway Publishing Company, 1912.

Harrison, Louis Reeves. "Stage Plays." Moving Picture World (11

April 1914): 185.
Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York:

Macmillan, 1915.
McLaughlin, Robert. Broadway and Hollywood: A History of

Economic Interaction. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

Patterson, Joseph Medill. "The Nickelodeon: The Poor Man's

Elementary Course in the Drama." Saturday Evening Post

180, no. 21 (23 November 1907): 10-11.
Tibbetts, John C. The American Theatrical Film: Stages in

Development. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State

University Popular Press, 1985.
Vardac, A. Nicholas. Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from

Garrick to Griffith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1949.

John C. Tibbetts

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THEATERS

Throughout the twentieth century, motion pictures were
screened in a host of different places, including schools,
churches, parks, and retail stores. But until the use of the
home VCR became widespread in the 1980s, the primary
site for film exhibition was the movie theater, which
offered on a regular basis — and always for the price of a
ticket — a moving picture program, a social experience,
and sometimes much more. "Despite the glamour of
Hollywood," wrote economist Mae Huettig in 1944,
"the crux of the motion picture industry is the theater"
(p. 54). To a great extent, this remained true well into
the late twentieth century.

From their introduction, movie theaters have varied
considerably in size, architecture, technology, location,
clientele, ownership, and symbolic significance. They
have varied over time as well, with the first generation
of nickelodeons giving way to buildings, grand or mod-
est, that were actually constructed as film theaters, even
veritable picture palaces, as they were quickly dubbed.
The classical Hollywood system relied on glamorous,
often huge, first-run metropolitan venues as well as more
modest urban neighborhood theaters and small-town
picture houses. When motion-picture attendance fell
dramatically from the late 1940s through the 1970s,
drive-ins provided a novel alternative to the traditional
"hardtop" theater, as did art house cinemas specializing
in non-Hollywood fare. The multiplex, often housed in a
shopping center, became a principal exhibition site in the
late 1960s and 1970s, only to be replaced by the free-
standing megaplex, the latest evolution of the movie
theater. Each of these theatrical screening sites offered
not only a differently designed space for the public
exhibition of film but also promoted a particular type

of film program and provided a distinctive moviegoing
experience. The various incarnations of the movie theater
reflect the shifting place of cinema in the everyday life of
the twentieth century.

THE NICKELODEON

By 1907 cities and towns across the United States and
Canada were home to a new site for commercial amuse-
ment, the nickelodeon — an inexpensive, unadorned mov-
ing picture theater charging a mere five cents per ticket.
It is difficult to ascertain when the first nickelodeon
appeared. One frequently cited origin is the Nickelodeon
theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, opened in June
1905 by Harry Davis, a local commercial entertainment
entrepreneur. Before this date, moving pictures had
often been screened in standard entertainment venues:
outdoor tent shows; small-town opera houses; and, most
notably, vaudeville theaters. Such sites were soon over-
shadowed by the nickelodeon. New theaters with names
like the Bijou Dream and the Gem opened in every
region, devoted primarily (though not exclusively) to
screening film programs. Even if many of these
theaters were short-lived enterprises, the nickelodeon
boom unquestionably went a long way toward establish-
ing moving pictures as a key form of commercial
entertainment.

One reason for the remarkable jump in the number
of moving picture theaters in the years from 1906 to
1909 was the increased availability of narrative film,
which could be rented from film exchanges rather than
purchased outright. Theaters owners thus had access to a
steady stream of new product, which they presented in

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

239

Theaters

Nickelodeons playing Edison Company films. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

a continuously run loop throughout the day. Along with
a film program that was changed at least three times a
week, nickelodeons frequently offered musical accompa-
niment, as well as "illustrated songs," which were vocal
performances of popular tunes illustrated by colorful
projected slides.

While certain nickelodeons tried to cater to a "bet-
ter" clientele, the majority of the new theaters that sud-
denly appeared in urban downtowns, residential
neighborhoods, and the main streets of rural commun-
ities made no attempt to compete in size and decor with
concert halls or even local opera houses. An empty for-
mer retail store, a projector, two hundred or even fewer
wooden chairs, a piano, and some sort of ticket booth
would suffice to create a nickelodeon. To announce its
presence and attract passersby, this new type of commer-
cial showplace often quite literally spilled out onto the

sidewalk. A decorated facade, complete with poster dis-
plays, drew attention to the venue, as did music that
might be directed out toward the street. Typically open
during the day and well into the evening, in certain
places even on Sundays, the low-overhead nickel theater
proved to be more than another faddish get-rich-quick
scheme.

Early estimates from the motion picture trade press
suggest that by 1910, as many as ten thousand nickel-
odeons were operating in the United States. As the nick-
elodeon boom continued, the movies increasingly
became woven into the fabric of daily life, especially for
workingclass audiences that could take advantage of this
accessible and cheap form of public amusement. Heavily
dependent on a regular clientele that lived within walking
or streetcar distance, the nickelodeon both presented a
nationally available product (the movies) and offered a

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public, social entertainment experience that reflected the
tastes of a particular community, neighborhood, or eth-
nic group.

Competition among theater operators was fierce, as
all sought to make what might have initially been a
patron's novel experience into a regular habit. From the
ranks of nickelodeon operators came a number of men
who would eventually shape the motion picture industry,
including Marcus Loew (1870-1927) (one of the found-
ers of MGM), William Fox (1879-1952) (founder of
Fox studios), and the Warner brothers. In addition,
almost immediately nickelodeons faced criticism from
religious groups and civil authorities, in part because
these cheap theaters attracted audiences that included
women and children. Fire was also a very real danger,
given the flammability of the 35 mm nitrate film then in
use. The danger was especially great for the large number
of projectionists (or "operators") that the burgeoning
industry required. Municipal building and safety codes
were instituted to regulate the construction of projection
booths, the seating arrangement, and the means of entry
and exit. City license fees afforded another form of
regulation.

THEATERS BUILT FOR THE MOVIES

The nickelodeon boom echoed throughout North
America between 1906 and 1910, and in some regions,
this type of low-overhead, barebones moving picture
theater remained a viable business venture well into the
1910s, especially in villages and small towns. But the
competition for the commercial amusement market and
the desire to reach a broader — and likely more middle-
class — audience meant that the simple storefront nickel-
odeon increasingly gave way to larger, more pretentious,
and more permanent venues. Theaters originally built for
stage productions and vaudeville were refitted to house
moving picture shows, as were other retail spaces.
Fenced-in, open-air theaters, called airdomes, made mov-
iegoing an appealing activity on summertime evenings,
especially in St. Louis, Missouri, and other larges cities, as
well as small towns, across the American Midwest. Most
important, buildings, like the Regent Theatre in New
York City (built in 1912), began to be specifically
designed for moving picture presentation. Since these
buildings frequently had balconies, full-size stages, and
even dressing rooms, they differed little in design from
legitimate theaters of the period. Nonetheless, the con-
struction of buildings designated as moving picture thea-
ters signaled the growing prominence of film in the field
of commercial amusement, as well as the increasing vis-
ibility of the movies in daily life.

Sometimes with considerably more than five hun-
dred seats, these new moving picture theaters promised a

blend of comfort and elegance to rival established
urban theaters and the all-purpose, small-town venues,
generically referred to as "opera houses." Such movie
theaters typically featured electrically illuminated mar-
quees, inviting foyers, decorative terra cotta facades,
wood-paneled walls, marble or carpeted floors, and
plushly upholstered chairs. They boasted of their mod-
ern air circulation and heating systems, in addition to
fireproof projection booths and up-to-date safety pre-
cautions. Advertising often foregrounded these design
features in an attempt to expand the social class makeup
of the audience and to waylay public concern about the
potential hazards of the movie theater, especially for
children.

At the same time, since many of these theaters had
one or two balcony sections, exhibitors could strictly
segregate their patrons, sometimes by age or social class,
but most often by race, with the less desirable balcony
being "reserved" for African Americans. Even in the
nickelodeon era, so-called "colored theaters" had begun
to appear that catered specifically to African American
audiences. With racial segregation a fact of everyday life
well into the 1950s and 1960s, "colored" theaters — in a
few cases owned as well as operated by African
Americans — were a prominent feature of African
American communities across the United States, espe-
cially in the sound era. More than four hundred such
theaters were in operation in the early 1940s and even
more in the immediate post- World War II period.

The movie theaters that began to appear in early
1910s were often equipped with well-appointed wash-
rooms and lounges, whose attendants joined an increas-
ingly large corps of movie theater employees: uniformed
ushers and doormen, ticket-takers, projectionists, and
musicians. The presence of these workers helped to link
the theater to the community or neighborhood where it
was located, a connection that was underscored when the
theater was made available for charity events, amateur
shows, and even public school outings.

In addition to their increasingly long and ambitious
film programs, the new wave of movie theaters continued
to feature musical entertainment, long after the illus-
trated song had ceased to be a regular part of the bill.
Mechanical instruments like the Wurlitzer Photoplayer
provided both musical accompaniment and sound
effects. Even smaller theaters began to employ live
"orchestras" — which, in practice, could mean anything
from a drum-piano duo to an eight-piece ensemble per-
forming in the pit in front of the stage.

PICTURE PALACES

Among the countless movie theaters built in the early
and mid-1 9 10s, a few metropolitan venues, like the

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241

Theaters

THOMAS W. LAMB

b. Dundee, Scotland, 1871, d. 26 February 1942

Thomas W. Lamb was the most important of several
notable architects who had a significant effect on the
design, prestige, and cultural role of the American movie
theater during the age of the picture palace. Lamb (and his
firm) designed more than three hundred theaters,
primarily in the United States but also in Canada,
England, Australia, and South Africa.

Born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1871, Lamb moved to
the United States in 1899 and soon thereafter graduated
from Cooper Union Institute with a degree in architecture.
After working as a city building inspector, Lamb was hired
by William Fox (future head of Fox studios) in 1 909 to
design his first major project, the City Theatre, in New York
City. When called on three years later to design the Regent
Theatre, which was promoted as the first high-class theater
built expressly to screen motion pictures, Lamb devised a
facade borrowing from Italian renaissance architecture and
an auditorium that featured clear sightlines for all seats.

Then followed a series of major theaters designed by
Lamb, primarily in midtown Manhattan, including the
Strand (1914), the Rialto (1916), and the Rivoli (1917),
with its facade of white-glazed terra-cotta columns
resembling the Parthenon. Lamb's position as the
preeminent theater architect in the United States was
sealed when he designed what was to be the world's largest
theater, the Capitol, which opened in October 1919. For
the 5,300-seat Capitol, Lamb relied on huge fluted
columns, heavy damask curtains, a grand dome, and
extensive silver leaf decoration. Like the Capitol, Lamb's
other theaters in this period (including venues in

Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati) reflected his
indebtedness to eighteenth-century British architect
Robert Adam, whose neoclassical buildings were
influenced by ancient Roman architecture.

In the mid- 1920s Lamb's theaters became much
more ornate, drawing, for example, on the
flamboyance of the Italian baroque. In picture palaces
like Loew's Midland Theater in Kansas City and the
Fox in San Francisco, Lamb offered what he called
"something more gay, more flashy" that would
captivate audiences with its splendor. By the late-
1920s Lamb's theaters became even more exotic,
borrowing freely and combining elements from
so-called "Oriental" designs (Persian, Hindu, and
Byzantine) as well as European motifs. Lamb even
borrowed from fellow theater architect John Eberson,
and created a series of "atmospheric" theaters, where
the traditional domed ceiling was replaced by a
facsimile of the sky and the auditorium walls were
decorated to resemble the interior of a garden or
elegant patio. Lamb's work continued in a much
different direction in the 1930s with designs for the
art-deco styled Trans-Lux newsreel theaters.

FURTHER READING

Hall, Ben M. The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the
Golden Age of the Movie Palace. New York: Potter, 1961.

Naylor, David. American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of
Pantasy. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981.

Gregory A. Waller

3,000-seat Strand Theatre in New York City (opened
in 1914), set a new standard for opulence and size,
initiating what would become the age of the picture
palace. The term itself is difficult to define, though
"picture palace" is generally taken to mean a multi-
leveled venue with at least fifteen hundred seats; a fan-
shaped auditorium; a complete stage and orchestra pit; a
Mighty Wurlitzer or some other theater organ; state-of-
the-art projection and lighting equipment; luxurious
decor; ornate architectural features; and a massive,
brightly lit facade that gave the theater an inescapable
presence when viewed from the street. (The largest pic-

ture palaces, containing more than two thousand seats
and located in a metropolitan downtown area, were also
referred to as "deluxe" theaters.) A virtual army of well-
trained, uniformed service employees staffed the well-
appointed restrooms of the picture palace and guided
patrons through a grand lobby, up a sweeping staircase,
down wide promenades, and into the multi-tiered audi-
torium. Through the initiative of theater owners like
Balaban and Katz (operating in Chicago), air condition-
ing became another selling point of the picture palace by
the late 1920s. All these elements collectively made the
picture palace not only an architectural showpiece that

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Theaters

stood out in the busy shopping district but also an
experience quite distinct from the mundane.

Architects like Thomas W. Lamb (1871-1942) and
John Eberson (1875-1965) were key figures in develop-
ing the opulent style of the American picture palace,
which could vary quite dramatically from theater to
theater, while always being an exercise in extravagance
and ostentatious grandeur. Such theaters might be organ-
ized around a single theme — for example, a Spanish,
Persian, and Chinese motif, which would be evident in
the interior wall treatment, lighting, stage design, carpet-
ing, fixtures, and furniture. The goal was to create an
environment where the movies were only one part of a
larger entertainment experience.

Eberson specialized in what were known as "atmos-
pheric" picture palaces, beginning with the Majestic in
Houston, Texas, which was built in 1922. The audito-
rium in an Eberson theater was constructed to resemble a
magnificent courtyard or exotic garden, overflowing with
decorative detail and covered with a plaster ceiling built
to resemble an open sky filled with moving clouds or
twinkling stars. Other architectural firms also had a sig-
nificant influence on the design of the American picture
palace, most notably Rapp and Rapp, which designed
theaters in Chicago, St. Louis, and a number of other
cities for Balaban and Katz and for Paramount studio's
Publix Theater chain.

Theaters like Manhattan's 6,200-seat Roxy (opened
in 1927), designed by Walter Ahlschlager and billed as
the "cathedral of the movies," came to symbolize the
excess and grandiose ambitions of the 1920s picture
palace. As might be expected, the most deluxe theaters
were found in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los
Angeles, though a host of smaller cities, including
Minneapolis, Minnesota, Portland, Oregon, and Jersey
City, New Jersey, could boast of having world-class
picture palaces, often built as part of the Loew's or Fox
first-run theater circuits. Fewer than seventy-five deluxe
theaters were operating at the end of the silent film era,
yet these metropolitan venues provided a disproportion-
ately large share of the box-office revenues for the major
Hollywood studios.

At the same time, the studios also depended on the
distribution of their continuous stream of features,
shorts, and newsreels to the twenty thousand other movie
theaters in the United States. Even with the construction
of deluxe palaces, the average size of the movie theater in
the late silent era remained around five hundred seats,
approximately the same as it had been in the mid-1910s.
In other words, most spectators experienced the movies
not in a magnificent picture palace but in a much more
modest and less spectacular venue, probably located in
the same business district where they bought groceries,

got haircuts, and shopped for dry goods. However, the
elaborate design, luxurious interior decoration, and com-
manding street presence of the picture palace did con-
stitute an ideal toward which smaller theaters might
aspire as they were periodically remodeled or updated.

The picture palace quickly came to occupy a priv-
ileged symbolic position in writing about the "golden
age" of the movies. If the picture palace has had a long
life as an icon signifying a spectacular and glamorous
Hollywood, as a building it was very costly to operate
and maintain. The picture palace was also linked to the
economic fortunes of the downtown area where it almost
always was located. By the 1950s, these once-grand
theaters began to be razed or transformed for other uses.
Restoration work at the end of the twentieth century
rescued a small number of America's picture palaces.
An object of nostalgia and community pride, the pre-
served picture palace (like the Grand Lake Theatre in
Oakland, California) was usually not reopened as a
movie theater; instead, it was restored to serve primarily
as a multi-use community theater and venue for high-
culture performances.

WIRING FOR SOUND

The American film industry's transition to sound, which
began in 1927 and was completed by 1930, had an
immediate effect on the nation's movie theaters. The cost
of installing a sound system — "wiring for sound," as it
was called — could be prohibitive for the independent
owner-operator of a small theater. There were competing
sound systems, and each system required the purchase of
new projection equipment in addition to speakers. Costs for
converting theaters to sound had dropped significantly by
1 929, though the investment could still run as high as seven
thousand dollars for even a small theater. Good quality
sound reproduction might even entail the redesigning of
the auditorium itself to improve acoustics, as well as the
installation of a quieter heating and cooling system. (The
transition to sound thus indirecdy led to an increased use of
air conditioning.) On the positive side, the novelty of sound
became, in the short term, a major drawing card for theaters.

Particularly from the late 1920s through the mid-
1950s, the state of sound film technology required that
projectionists be responsible for the audio as well as visual
quality of the movies screened. Staffing of the movie
theater changed as well with the introduction of sound,
as talkies quickly replaced the regular live entertainment
that had always been part of the moviegoing experience.

In effect, with Hollywood fully committed to the
production of sound films, theater owners had no choice
except to wire for sound, sell out, or close. Approximately
two-thirds of the fifteen thousand theaters in the United
States were wired for sound by 1930, as the new

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Theaters

technology spread to small- and medium-sized theaters
outside of first-run venues in major cities. The problems
caused for theater owners by the industry's rapid transi-
tion to sound were compounded with the increasing
economic effects of the Great Depression, which began
in 1929. The Film Daily Yearbook estimated in 1933 that
no more than half of the movie theaters in certain parts
of the United States were actually wired for sound and
open for business. At the same time, after a period of
unbridled expansion and acquisition, major theater
chains owned by Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros,
went into receivership, often meaning that the control of
theaters reverted to individual owner-operators or to
regionally based companies.

BEYOND THE PICTURE PALACE

Coupled with the economic woes of the 1930s and the
costs of wiring theaters for sound films, exhibitors also
faced the increasingly widespread popularity of radio
(with its "free" entertainment). In addition, a burgeon-
ing nontheatrical market for moving pictures had
emerged with the growing availability of 16mm sound
projectors in the later 1930s. Exhibitors increased efforts
to attract audiences to the theater by lowering ticket
prices and relying on special promotions, contests, and
double-feature programs. Decreased costs made air
conditioning a more available amenity by the later
1930s, so that the movie theater became one of the first
public sites to offer ordinary citizens the luxury of climate-
controlled comfort. At the same time, the sale of candy
and, especially, popcorn emerged as a crucial source of
revenue for the exhibitor, with carbonated soft drinks soon
to follow in the 1 940s. Vending machines and, eventually,
a larger and more elaborate concession stand became a
standard component of the movie theater. Concession
sales often brought more profit to the theater than box
office receipts.

The 1930s also saw a marked drop in the number of
new theaters — and picture palaces, in particular — being
constructed. However, even small-town venues that
depended on rural audiences had long realized that peri-
odic renovation and updating to decor as well as equip-
ment was a sensible business practice that associated the
theater with the "modern." Art deco design, with cleaner
lines and less surface decoration, became a more prom-
inent feature in renovated theaters and the relatively few
newly constructed theaters. This style was featured in one
of the few new theatrical ventures to emerge in the midst
of the Depression: the small but sleekly designed newsreel
theaters operated by Trans-Lux and other companies in
major metropolitan areas. Equipped with an innovative
rear-projection system, the first Trans-Lux theater
opened in New York City in 1931, creating a trend that

flourished during World War II and continued until the
introduction of commercial television.

One architect who did continue to design striking
new and remodeled theaters during the 1930s was
S. Charles Lee (1899-1990), who worked principally in
California. For example, Lee's streamlined aesthetic,
which made ample use of rounded forms, horizontal
lines, and industrial material (aluminum, glass, and
chrome), was especially evident in the Academy
Theatre, which was built in 1939 in Inglewood,
California. Other architects, including, most notably,
Ben Schlanger, also argued in the mid-1950s for an even
more austere and efficient type of modern theater,
designed and built exclusively for screening moving pic-
tures and intended to maximize the viewing experience.
In some respects, these ideas were not fully implemented
until the emergence of the megaplex theater complexes of
the 1980s and 1990s.

DRIVE-INS AND ART CINEMAS

Shrinking movie attendance from the late 1940s into the
1950s, coupled with the increasing suburbanization of
America, led to a new round of theater closings as well as
to certain technological innovations intended to under-
score the superiority of the big-screen experience over the
small, black-and-white image of home television.
Preeminent were much-publicized wide-screen processes,
which offered images wider and more horizontal than the
standard "academy" ratio found on television. Although
wide screen had been experimented with at various times
in film history, it did not become a key selling point for
Hollywood until the mid-1950s. To project wide-screen
CinemaScope or VistaVision films, theaters needed to
convert projectors as well as install a new screen.
(Additional speakers for stereo sound were another
option, more likely found in high-end theaters.) This
upgrading was costly, but deemed necessary if theaters
were to offer an experience that drew customers away
from their television sets and back to the movies.

Another, more significant lure for moviegoers in the
1950s and beyond was the drive-in theater, which began
in the United States, spread to Canada, and eventually
even to Australia. In 1933 the first drive-in, called the
Automobile Movie Theatre, was opened by Richard
M Hollingshead Jr. in Camden, New Jersey. It accom-
modated four hundred cars arranged in a terraced and
ramped space, allowing for relatively unobstructed sight
lines toward the mounted screen. Fewer than three hun-
dred drive-ins had appeared by the end of World War II,
but by 1958 the number across the United States hit a
peak of almost six thousand. They then constituted
almost half of the nation's total screens, with many
drive-ins to be found in rural areas or near smaller towns,

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245

Theaters

where setup costs were low and commercial amusements
rare. Construction of drive-ins in suburbia accelerated in
the late 1950s, driven by the availability of inexpensive
land, the shifting demographics of America, and the
ubiquity of the automobile.

Drive-ins, sometimes equipped with small play-
grounds and picnic areas, offered ease of parking and
access, a decidedly homey and informal atmosphere, an
opportunity for an inexpensive family night out, and a
site that promised relative freedom (and even privacy) for
teenagers on dates. Cafeteria-style snack bars became a
substantial source of income, offering hot dogs and pizza
as well as candy, soft drinks, and popcorn. Live enter-
tainment sometimes served as another drawing card.
Even under the best circumstances, the drive-in was not
an optimal venue for viewing motion pictures: high-
quality screens were expensive to erect; twilight washed
out the projected image, which could be proportionally
quite small; and sound quality was poor because of
portable speakers, though eventually some drive-ins
transmitted movie soundtracks through car radios.

While drive-ins initially competed with indoor thea-
ters for mainstream Hollywood movies, even gaining
access on occasion to first-run releases, these outdoor
venues eventually began to be associated primarily with
more marginalized types of programming, often low-
budget genre movies well outside the boundaries of
standard family fare: teenpix in the 1960s; horror films;
softcore sexploitation; and even, during the 1970s,
X- rated fare. By the early 1990s, fewer than nine hundred
drive-ins (including some multiscreen venues) remained
in business, sometimes operating as swap meets and flea
markets on the weekends.

Paralleling the rise of the drive-in was the abandon-
ment, demolition, or conversion of a great many urban
movie theaters, both pictures palaces and smaller neigh-
borhood venues (which sometimes became churches or
markets). Some larger downtown theaters stayed in busi-
ness by shifting to Spanish-language films or to low-
budget fare, like the wave of horror and science fiction
films that emerged in the 1950s.

At the other end of the film exhibition business from
the drive-in was the art cinema, whose roots were in
small, metropolitan-area theaters that opened in the
1920s and 1930s like New York City's International
Film Arts Guild and Little Carnegie Playhouse. Such
venues targeted a well-to-do clientele by screening other-
wise unavailable films that were experimental, foreign-
language, or in some other way identifiable as "art"
rather than commercial entertainment. By the early
1950s, the art house or, in industry parlance, "sure
seater," was gaining popularity, not only in metropolitan
centers but also in smaller cities and towns that were

home to colleges and universities. Catering to an adult
audience and often charging appreciably higher ticket
prices than ordinary movie theaters, the typical art house
was a newly constructed theater of approximately five
hundred seats or a refurbished older venue, intimate
and decorated with an eye toward modernist design
rather than picture palace exoticism. Coffee was the con-
cession of choice, complementing the films screened,
which might include revivals of classics as well as new
non-American films. Attendance at such theaters peaked
in the 1960s and 1970s, before the widespread diffusion
of the home VCR allowed for a different type of art film
distribution.

FROM MULTIPLEX TO MEGAPLEX

Before 1960, a few theaters had been built in shopping
centers. There were even rare attempts to create twin
cinemas, so-called because they included two separate
auditoria with a common foyer and box office. But the
multiplex was very much a product of the 1960s, usually
credited to Stanley H. Durwood (1920-1999), who built
his first twin cinema in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1963.
Housed in a suburban shopping center, Durwood's mul-
tiplex used the same projection facility and concession
stand for both (one seating three hundred, the other four
hundred). The concept proved profitable and repeatable,
and Durwood's American Multi-Cinema (AMC) com-
pany quickly became one of the major theater chains in
the United States.

The years from 1965 to 1970 saw approximately one
hundred new shopping center theaters open annually in
the United States, each promising ample parking, an
array of retail stores, and more than enough room for
an inexpensive multiplex. This new type of venue flour-
ished while the total number of movie theaters in the
United States remained relatively constant, at fewer than
ten thousand (40 percent of which were drive-ins). The
multiplex trend extended to urban settings, as certain
picture palaces were remodeled to house multiple screens.

As the multiplex evolved after the mid-1960s, it
came to feature up to eight box-shaped theaters, each
seating usually fewer than three hundred patrons. When
built within shopping malls, multiplexes became even
more conveniently integrated into an inclusive, teenage-
friendly retail environment. Small screens and cinder-
block walls that provided poor soundproofing made the
multiplex, at best, a marginally satisfactory site for watch-
ing the movies. One improvement in the 1960s that
greatly benefited the multiplex was the introduction of
the powerful xenon bulb, a steady-burning, long-lasting
light source that replaced the carbon arc in motion
picture projectors. Increasingly automated platter projec-
tors allowed for the entire program (trailers, advertise-

246

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Theaters

ments, and feature film) to be placed on one reel that
required no rewinding. Theoretically, at least, an
untrained projectionist could simultaneously run all the
screenings in a multiplex.

The 1970s saw significant improvement in the qual-
ity of theatrical sound reproduction, first with the intro-
duction by Universal in Earthquake (1974) of
"sensurround," then with the increased use of the highly
influential Dolby noise reduction system in films like
Star Wars (1977) and Saturday Night Fever (1977). By
the mid-1980s, Dolby had become the industry standard,
and the large number of new theaters constructed in the
1980s and 1990s prominently featured state-of-the-art
sound systems, like Lucasfilm's THX and Sony's
Dynamic Digital Sound, which made the audio experi-
ence an increasingly essential aspect of theatrical film
exhibition.

The new multiscreen theaters built after the mid-
1980s, called megaplexes, differed significantly from the
boxy mall or shopping center twin cinemas. Offering
fifteen or more screens under the same roof, the mega-
plex was typically housed in a spacious, freestanding
building, surrounded by a vast parking lot and easily
accessible by car. In more urban locations, the megaplex
might be situated within a shopping mall, like the
Beverly Center Cineplex in Los Angeles, built in 1982
by the Canadian Cineplex theater circuit, which would
soon become Cineplex Odeon, one of the top theater
chains in North America. Cineplex Odeon is often cred-
ited with beginning the era of the megaplex. The theater
construction boom in the United States and, eventually,
in much of Europe and Asia, that lasted well into the
1990s meant that the megaplex became the predominant
type of movie theater during a period of surprising
growth for the motion picture industry. Between 1988
and 1998 the total number of screens in the United
States rose from twenty-three thousand to thirty-four
thousand, while screens in western Europe rose ten percent
(to over twenty-three thousand) and in Asia — exclusive
of China — remained roughly constant.

Promoted and, in part, designed as entertainment
"destinations" or "complexes," megaplexes often fea-
tured video arcades, flashy interior design, extensive con-
cession areas, computerized ticket counters, and indoor
cafes. Especially in comparison to the shopping center
multiplex of a generation earlier, megaplexes promised an
enriched moviegoing experience, with comfortable sta-
dium seating arranged to provide each spectator with an
unobstructed view of a screen that was appreciably larger
in relation to the auditorium size than had previously
been the case. Having twelve auditoria (with different
seating capacities) under one roof allowed for great flex-

ibility in maximizing box office receipts over the short
and longer term, as a highly publicized blockbuster might
open on five screens and within two weeks be cut back to
one or two of the smaller screening sites.

From the nickelodeon to the megaplex, the movie
theater has proven to be a remarkably durable and varied
commercial entertainment enterprise. It is a site that has
deeply shaped the way countless spectators have experi-
enced the movies.

SEE ALSO Art Cinema; Distribution; Early Cinema;
Exhibition; Silent Cinema; Sound; Technology

FURTHER READING

Acland, Charles R. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global
Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Bowers, Q. David. Nickelodeon Theatres and Their Music. Vestal,
NY: Vestal Press, 1986.

Franklin, Harold B. Motion Picture Theater Management. New
York: Doran, 1927.

Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie

Presentation in the United States. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Hall, Ben M. The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden
Age of the Movie Palace. New York: Potter, 1961.

Huettig, Mae D. Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944.

Hulfish, David S. Motion-Picture Work: A General Treatise on
Picture Taking, Picture Making, Photo-Plays, and Theater
Management and Operation. New York: Arno Press, 1970.

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen
to 1907. New York: Scribners, 1990.

Naylor, David. American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of
Fantasy. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981.

Seagrave, Kerry. Drive-in Theaters: A History from Their Inception
in 1933. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992.

Stones, Barbara. America Goes to the Movies: 100 Years of Motion
Picture Exhibition. North Hollywood, CA: National
Association of Theatre Owners, 1993.

Stote, Helen M., ed. The Motion Picture Theater: Planning,
Upkeep. New York: Society of Motion Picture Engineers,
1948.

Valentine, Maggie. The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An

Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles
Lee. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

Waller, Gregory A. Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the
History of Film Exhibition. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
2002.

Wilinsky, Barbara. Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House
Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Gregory A. Waller

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

247

THIRD CINEMA

Third Cinema is a descriptive and a prescriptive concept
that in practice is linked to, yet extends beyond, the
historical emergence of "Third World cinema" in West,
Southeastern, and Eastern Asia; Africa; Latin America;
and the Pacific Basin in the mid-twentieth century.
Whereas Third World cinema is loosely tied to processes
of decolonization and nation-building and includes
industrial filmmaking in its scope, Third Cinema is an
ideologically charged and aesthetically meaningful term
that denotes the adoption of an independent, often oppo-
sitional stance towards commercial genre and auteurist
cinemas emanating from the more developed, Western
(or Westernized, in the cases of Israel and Australia)
capitalist world. As such, Third Cinema is both less geo-
graphically bound and more actively shaped by anti-
imperialist and counterculture movements that emerged
during the 1960s. It points to the inherent power of
cinema, as a modern medium of communication, to
effect sociopolitical transformation within nations and
across continents; and it frequently blends a socialist
concern with workers' (and other oppressed peoples')
emancipation and democratic access to the media with
a commitment to cultural self-determination and artistic
innovation.

Optimally, spectators of Third Cinema are enlight-
ened as they critically confront their own reality through
an audiovisual (rather than written or academic) analysis
and recognize, in the portrayal of others' struggles, cir-
cumstances and aspirations that relate to their own. For
filmmakers and cultural policymakers, Third Cinema
involves the search for a sustainable and socially relevant
means of artistic expression in underindustrialized and
politically unstable or repressive conditions, while striv-

ing to promote solidarity among all peoples that have
experienced, or continue to grapple with, the yoke of
(neo) colonialism, with its racist, ethnocentric, classist,
and sexist underpinnings. Third Cinema thus takes areas
of national life often neglected by official discourse and
industrial cinema and thrusts them into the international
limelight. Broadly defined, Third Cinema can be pro-
duced with or without the support of the state, and
directed by amateurs as well as seasoned professionals.
It calls attention to parafilmic activity as well as to textual
content, exploring alternative modes of production, dis-
tribution, and exhibition, sources of aesthetic inspiration,
and even the meaning of the terms "professional,"
"mass," and "art" as they relate to cinema.

ORIGINS AND PERMUTATIONS

The term "Third Cinema" was coined in an interview
with the Argentine Cine Liberacion group, published in
the journal Cine Cubano (March 1969), and was then
more fully developed in the manifesto "Towards a Third
Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of
a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World," written by
Fernando Solanas (b. 1936) and Octavio Getino
(b. 1935), members of that group. Since its publication
in Tricontinenal (Havana, 1969), the essay has been
translated and published in many languages. Solanas
and Getino begin with the premise that in a situation
of neocolonialism or underdevelopment, filmmakers
need to begin shaping a practice that diverges both from
"First Cinema," industrial cinema that is commercially
distributed for profit, which can only lead to a sense of
inadequacy and impotence for neocolonized audiences;
and from "Second Cinema," art cinema developed by

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

249

Third Cinema

Glauber Rocha on the set of Barravento (The Turning Wind, 1962). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

talented individuals, some of whom attempt to contest
the status quo, yet whose work is ultimately recuperated
by the "System," if only to represent the possibility of
dissent. Hollywood cinema epitomizes the former, glob-
ally hegemonic model, whereas EuroAmerican and even
Latin American auteurist cinemas, taking the form of the
French nouvelle vague (new wave) or Brazilian cinema
novo, exemplify the second option. In contrast to these,
filmmakers are to side with "national culture" against the
culture "of the rulers" and develop films that the
"System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its
needs, or . . . that directly and explicitly set out to fight
the System." (Martin, New Latin American Cinema, p. 42).

A number of core precepts follow from this mission.
First, there is the creation of interdependence between a
revolutionary aesthetic and revolutionary activity, of
which the cinema is but one integral component — some-
thing easier said than done. Given the political struggle of
Third filmmakers on two fronts, one where resistance is
put up against neocolonial cultural domination and the
other where the masses become engaged in historical and
ideological analysis on the way to achieving national
liberation and class equality, Third Cinema faces two

tasks: the demystification of neocolonial art and media
(with their "universalist" discourse), and the search for a
film language that reflects and advances national
concerns.

These tasks require a close, and preferably dialectical,
relationship between film theory and practice. Indeed,
Solanas and Getino formulated the theory of Third
Cinema only after they had shot and released the three-
part documentary, La Hora de los Homos {Hour of the
Furnaces, 1968), which exhibits the form taken by cin-
ema when it is placed in the service of the "masses"
following a thorough analysis of the contemporary eco-
nomic, social, and political conjuncture. It is an essay
film, incorporating documentary footage from a wide
range of sources (including those antagonistic to the
filmmakers' project), in which facts are presented and
analyzed by way of intertitles and voice-over narration
that often disrupt the spectator's immersion in the die-
getic spaces of the images. According to Solanas and
Getino's formulation, documentary is most instrumental
in developing Third Cinema — it lays bare the lived expe-
rience of the majority, counterposing "naked reality" to
"movie-life," or the version of reality the ruling class

250

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Third Cinema

GLAUBER ROCHA

b. Glauber Pedro de Andrade Rocha, Vitoria da Conquista, Brazil, 14 March 1939,

d. 22 August 1981

A prolific writer and film critic as well as film auteur,
Glauber Rocha was a major exponent of the Brazilian cinema
novo movement. His introduction to film practice through
cinephilia, rather than formal training, triggered an affinity
with the French New Wave, notably Jean-Luc Godard, as
well as admiration for Italian neorealists, the postneorealist
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, and
Orson Welles. After completing two short films in his native
Bahia in 1959, Rocha joined a circle of young cineastes and
critics in Rio de Janeiro — the founders of cinema novo —
which led to his direction of Barravento ( The Turning Wind,
1962), a stark portrait of a Bahian fishing community.

Rocha hit his stride with Deus e o Diabo na Terra do
Sol {Black God, White Devil, 1964), which invokes
legendary cahoclo (mixed race) cult figures from the
Northeast within an epic format that exposes the injustices
suffered by the region's rural residents. Rocha never
sacrificed respect for popular mythology in favor of
ideological demystification, and the dialectical tension
between the two, combined with a hybrid style that ranges
from the minimalist and austere to the baroque and
operatic, supported an allegorical dimension that is often
lost on foreign viewers.

Following the 1964 military coup d'etat, Rocha
reflected on the failure of populism and leftist tactics in
the face of fascism in Terra em Transe (Land in Anguish,
1967). Prestigious awards and critical acclaim in Europe
facilitated his exile during the harshest years of the
dictatorship (1969 to 1976). Outside Brazil, Rocha
directed four international coproductions with Cuba,
Italy, and France, including a denunciation of European
colonialism in Africa, Der Leone Have Sept Cabecas ( The
Lion Has Seven Heads, 1969). Upon returning home, he
directed documentaries on Brazilian artists Emiliano
Di Cavalcanti and Jorge Amado, prior to making his film
summa, A Ldade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, 1980), a
highly reflexive and nonlinear work that investigates the
possibility of resurrection in the wake of colonialism.

As a theorist, Rocha is best remembered for his
manifesto 'An Aesthetic of Hunger" (1965), which calls

for an organic relationship between film style and the
objective conditions surrounding film production,
summarized in the statement "our originality is our
hunger." Thus Rocha defends the symbolic depiction of
violence while encouraging formal experimentation.
Notwithstanding his abbreviated life and the controversy
surrounding his reconciliation with the "liberalizing"
military government in the late 1970s, Rocha's legacy
looms large. His slogan "an idea in the head, a camera in
the hand" has inspired subsequent generations of
filmmakers, and his perspectives on the Cuban revolution
have been revived by his son, Eryk, in a prizewinning
feature documentary, Rocha Que Voa (Stone in the Sky,
2002).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil,
1964), Terra em Transe (Land in Anguish, 1967),
O Dragao da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio
das Mortes, 1969), Der Leone Have Sept Cabecas (The
Lion Has Seven Heads, 1969), Cabezas cortadas (Cutting
Heads, 1970)

FURTHER READING

Johnson, Randal. Cinema Novo X 5: Masters of

Contemporary Brazilian Film. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1984.

Rocha, Glauber. "An Aesthetic of Hunger." Translated by
Randal Johnson and Burnes Hollyman. In Brazilian
Cinema, edited by Randal Johnson and Robert Stam,
68-71. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Originally published as "A Estetica da Fome" in Revista
da Civilizacao Brasileira, July, 1965.

. "History of Cinema Novo." Framework 12 (1979):

19-27.

. "Humberto Mauro and the Historical Position of

Brazilian Cinema." Framework 11 (1979): 5—8.
Stam, Robert. Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative

History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and

Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema. Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Catherine L. Benamou

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

251

Third Cinema

would like the majority to consume (Martin, 1997,
pp. 42, 44) — and the form of the documentary should
jolt the spectator out of passivity into action. The polit-
ical effectivity of Third Cinema is assisted, finally, by its
circulation and screening in accessible formats (16mm)
in nonconventional circuits, in the same places where the
masses gather to organize themselves politically. This is a
spontaneous, "guerrilla" form of cinema that is collec-
tively produced, adapts to rapidly unfolding events, and
can be useful to grass roots struggles being developed
internationally; it advances the project of tricontinental
revolution.

Of course, Third Cinema was not proposed solely in
response to Argentina's stalled development and labor
organization under military rule (1966-1971), but was
inspired by the historical opportunities afforded by the
defeat of French colonial power in Vietnam (1954) and
Algeria (1962), the Cuban revolution (1959), and black
African independence movements (mid-1950s to the
mid-1970s). And it drew upon the precedent set by a
previous generation of realist filmmakers who studied at
the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, such as
Fernando Bird (b. 1925), whose Tire Die (Throw Me a
Dime, Argentina, 1960), and Nelson Pereira dos Santos
(b. 1928), whose Rio 40 Graus {Rio 100 Degrees R,
Brazil, 1955) and Rio Zona Norte (Rio, Northern Zone,
1957) struck a chord with Third Cinema projects fueled
by political urgency. In the sixties and seventies,
Argentine Third Cinema, to which filmmakers of diver-
gent leftist ideologies contributed (including Jorge
Cedron [1946-1980], Operation Masacre, [Operation
Massacre, 1973], and the Grupo Cine de la Base), reson-
ated with experiments elsewhere in Latin America, where
filmmakers were advancing their own theories of nation-
ally oriented, popularly based, and ideologically progres-
sive cinema — such as Glauber Rocha (1938-1981) in
Brazil, Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1928—1996) and Julio
Garcia Espinosa (b. 1926) in Cuba, Jorge Sanjines
(b. 1937) in Bolivia, and the Grupo Tercer Cine in
Chile. It also paralleled efforts in newly decolonized
nations, such as Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique,
and Senegal, to develop a socially meaningful and cultur-
ally reinvigorating film practice.

While the Argentine experiment was brutally cut
short by the military coup d'etat in 1976, which sent
most of its participants into either torture chambers or
exile, manifestations of Third Cinema have subsequently
sprouted in countries where "optimum" historical con-
ditions for radical change have not been present (at least
not on the same scale). Examples include fdms by Paul
Leduc (b. 1942) and Mari Carmen de Lara (b. 1957) in
Mexico, Marta Rodriguez in Colombia, Lino Brocka
(1939-1991) and Kidlat Tahimik (b. 1942) in the
Philippines, Isaac Julien (b. 1960) in Great Britain,

Euzhan Palcy (b. 1958) in Martinique, Masato Harada
(b. 1949) in Japan, Mrinal Sen (b. 1923), Girish Karnad
(b. 1938), and Govind Nihalani (b. 1940) in India,
Youssef Chahine (b. 1926) and Taufik Salih (b. 1927)
in Egypt, and Med Hondo (b. 1936) in Mauritania.
Solanas and Getino also did not rule out the possibility
for Third Cinema to develop in the shadow of First
Cinema, and their citation of US-based Newsreel's solid-
arity with Third World Liberation movements can be
followed by mention of the early work of Wayne Wang
(b. 1949), Lourdes Portillo, Christine Choy, Elia
Suleiman (b. 1960), Haile Gerima (b. 1946), Pedro
Rivera and Susan Zeig, among others.

The theory of Third Cinema has been revisited and
reworked, notably by Teshome Gabriel, who in his 1985
essay "Towards a Critical Theory of Third World
Cinema" (Stam and Miller, Film and Theory, pp. 298-
316) developed an historical sequence of its development
within a process of decolonization as well as a consider-
ation of film aesthetics in relation to oral and print forms
of communication. Also, Michael Martin in his Cinemas of
the Black Diaspora has considered its points of intersection
with black diasporic cinema, while cautioning against
reductionism; Jim Pines and Paul Willemen in their
Questions of Third Cinema have seen in Third Cinema a
means of reinvigorating a sterile oppositional practice and
aesthetic debate in the First World; and Ella Shohat and
Robert Stam in their Unthinking Eurocentrism have
expanded upon the elements of reflexivity and allegory in
Third Cinema to describe a more comprehensive and
flexible "Third Worldist" approach to filmmaking.

PROBLEMS AND DEBATES

It is not difficult to find fault with a concept and the
political investment placed in a corresponding mode of
film practice introduced over three decades ago.
Nevertheless, some constructive criticisms can be, and
have been, made in relation to the implications of
Solanas and Getino's argument on aesthetic, ethical,
and ideological grounds. The first is the problem of an
intellectual and artistic vanguard: those who are familiar
with the language of neocolonial cinema and thought, yet
who, in seeking a alternative, strike alliances with leaders
of the "masses." This is a tenuous arrangement, and it
sets up a potentially troublesome tension between
"means" and "ends": does film technology remain in
the hands of a select, educated few, and does political
education, in the form of audiovisual exposition and
analysis, flow in only one direction, from the lettered to
the unschooled? This contradiction is addressed by
Gabriel and Garcia Espinosa in their essay "For an
Imperfect Cinema," (Martin, New Latin American
Cinema, pp. 71-82.) Does this not pave the way for

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paternalism, at worst, or heavy handedness at best, raising
the objections of peers, such as Raul Ruiz (b. 1941), as to
the lack of attention to the rich semiotic potential of film
form owing to an excess of propagandizing? Sanjines
proposed a means of attenuating the gap between film-
maker and revolutionary subject by positioning the
screenwriter in the role of "interpreter and translator,"
so as to serve merely as an "expressive vehicle" for the
people, a change that finds reflection in film form, as well
as content (Martin, New Latin American Cinema, p. 63).

A related issue is the role of the state, in that if it is to
develop autonomy from commercial imperatives, Third
World cinema cannot survive without state protection
and financing; yet where should filmmakers be posi-
tioned in relation to the state apparatus, especially if that
apparatus is vulnerable to occupation by unfriendly rep-
resentatives? This question was raised when, with the
success of Juan Peron's return to power by popular vote
in 1973, Getino began to work inside the state censorship

board and disapproved of ongoing clandestine film activ-
ity, a stance that was answered by accusations of bureau-
cratic conformity with the government line. In relation to
who is able to make claims on the state, and how those
claims might advance Third Cinema, it is useful to note
the masculinist and occidental bias in the original theo-
ries, given that approaches may vary not only according
to historical circumstances (which Solanas and Getino
recommend), but according to gender and ethnicity.
Feminist cinema and indigenous media have had far-
reaching impact on the mode of production, chosen film
language, and targeted audience, which might not always
be a "mass" audience, yet is viewed as no less conducive
to generating change at the national level. Finally, there is
the complex goal of cultural self-determination, and the
extent to which a truly autochthonous media practice can
develop in underindustrialized or in neo- and postcolo-
nial circumstances. Is it possible to conceive of West
African cinema without European funding and technical

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

253

Third Cinema

assistance? Was it wrong for European directors such as
Joris Ivens (1898-1989) (Chile and China), Chris
Marker (b. 1921) (Chile, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau), and
Gillo Pontecorvo (b. 1919) (Algeria, the Caribbean) to
play an advisory and collaborative role in the develop-
ment of Third Cinema? How do these "Western
assisted" efforts weigh against the film initiatives of Ruy
Guerra (b. 1931) (Mozambique) in Latin America, and
of Santiago Alvarez (1919-1998) (Cuba) in Chile and
Vietnam, which on the surface suggest a more level play-
ing field for Third World players?

Finally, historical trends, such as the increasing fre-
quency with which film directors work in exile or on the
move, have placed question marks around the relation-
ship of Third Cinema to a "national project," prompting
Iranian-born theorist Hamid Naficy to call for acknowl-
edgment of its intersection with an "interstitial cinema"
created by exilic directors (such as Palestinians Michel
Khleifi [b. 1950] and Mona Hatoum) and wandering or
diasporic directors (such as Brazilian-Algerian Karim
Ainouz [b. 1966] and Flora Gomes [b. 1949] from
Guinea-Bissau), as well as filmmakers of minority ethnic
backgrounds working within nation-states dominated by
other groups (such as Kurds in Turkey, Turkish film-
makers in Germany). On the other hand, powerful film
industries have become interested in "Third World"
actors, settings, and subject matter, leading to films that
resemble "Third Worldist" films in strategy and theme,
but are directed by industry-sawy EuroAmericans, such
as Joshua Marston, whose Maria Full of Grace (2004) was
shot in Colombia, co-produced by HBO Films and Santa
Fe Productions, with Journeyman Pictures, Tucan
Producciones Cinematograficas Ltda. (Colombia), and
Alter-Cine (based in Mexico City). These developments
suggest that Third Cinema is still very much alive as an
object of renewed analysis and debate.

SEE ALSO Africa South of the Sahara; Arab Cinema;
Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Colonialism and
Postcolonialism; Cuba; Diasporic Cinema; Egypt;
Ideology; Marxism; Mexico; National Cinema

FURTHER READING

Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987.

Barnard, Tim, ed. Argentine Cinema. Toronto: Nightwood
Editions, 1986.

Burton-Carvajal, Julianne, ed. "Revision del Cine de los

Cincuenta/Revisioning Film in the Fifties." Special edition.
Nuevo Texto Critico 21/22 (Enero-Diciembre 1998).

Downing, John D. H., ed. Film and Politics in the Third World.
New York: Praeger, 1987.

Elena, Alberto, and Marina Diaz Lopez, eds. The Cinema of Latin
America. Reprint ed. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

Martin, Michael T., ed. Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity,
Dependence, and Oppositionality. Detroit, MI : Wayne State
University Press, 1995.

, ed. New Latin American Cinema. Vol. I: Theory,

Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations. Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic

Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Pines, Jim, and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema.
London: British Film Institute, 1989.

Robin, Diana, and Ira Jaffe, eds. Redirecting the Gaze: Gender,
Theory, and Cinema in the Third World. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1999.

Sanjines, Jorge, and the Ukamau Group. Theory and Practice of a
Cinema With the People. Translated by Richard Schaaf.
Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1989. Originally
published by Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico City, 1979.

Shafik, Viola. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism:
Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York:
Routledge, 1994.

Stam, Robert. "Hour of the Furnaces and the Two Avant

Gardes." Millennium Film Journal 7/8/9 (Fall/Winter 1980-
1981): 151-164.

Stam, Robert, and Toby Miller, eds. Film and Theory: An Anthology.
Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Catherine L. Benamou

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THRILLERS

The thriller goes the grain of mundane modern life while
at the same time remaining immersed in it. This concept
indicates that the thriller is an essentially modern form,
whose rise coincides with the arrival of urban industri-
alism, mass society, middle-class lifestyle, and the twen-
tieth century. Although it is often classified as a genre, in
practice the thriller spreads itself across several recognized
genres. One may speak of detective thrillers, horror thrill-
ers, spy thrillers, and police thrillers, to name just a few.
On the other hand, within a single genre — say, science
fiction — there may be some films that are clearly thrillers
(e.g., the 1956 alien-invasion drama Invasion of the Body
Snatchers) and others that do not fit the label so well
(such as the 1971 satiric fabled Clockwork Orange). The
thriller can be thought of as a metagenre that gathers
several other genres under its umbrella, and also as a band
in the spectrum that colors certain thriller-receptive
genres.

The slippery concept of the thriller is best grasped by
comparing it to a closely related and sometimes over-
lapping form: the adventure tale. Both involve a sense of
departure from humdrum existence into a realm that is
more dangerous and exciting. In adventure tales like
Treasure Island (1934), The African Queen (1951) and
Raiders of the lost Ark (1981), that sense of departure is
obtained by a movement out of the everyday world and
into another world that is clearly removed from the
sphere of mundane, modern-day life: the South Seas,
the Amazon jungle, the Arabian desert. The thriller, on
the other hand, remains rooted within the ordinary
world, into which are brought those transforming ele-
ments (a murder, a monster, a vital secret) that charge it
with a spirit of danger and adventure. Rather than trans-

porting us to an exotic other world, the thriller creates a
double world, one that is both exotic and everyday,
primitive and modern, marvelous and mundane.

Other, secondary characteristics of the thriller
include: vulnerable protagonists; a corresponding sense
of vulnerability created in the audience through suspense
and ambivalent feelings (e.g., anxiety/pleasure, sympathy
for the villain); labyrinthine settings and narrative struc-
tures, the better to entangle both hero and audience;
and, mainly in earlier eras, exotic elements evoking the
Mysterious East.

ORIGINS OF THE MOVIE THRILLER

The thriller goes against the grain of mundane modern
life while at the same time remaining immersed in it.
This concept indicates that the thriller is an essentially
modern form, whose rise coincides with the arrival of
urban industrialism, mass society, middle-class lifestyle,
and the twentieth century. In other words, the thriller is a
response to a modern world that is perceived under
normal circumstances to be fundamentally not thrilling.
As Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) observed in a 1936
magazine article ("Why 'Thrillers' Thrive," in Gottlieb,
p. 109), "Our civilization has so screened and sheltered
us that it isn't practicable to experience sufficient thrills
at firsthand." The thriller seeks to redeem the unadven-
turous modern world with a spirit of old-fashioned
adventure.

Although the thriller did not fully emerge until the
early part of the twentieth century, it has relevant roots
reaching back to the eighteenth century. Three literary
antecedents are especially important: the Gothic novel,

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255

In thrillers like North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), the marvelous enters the world of the mundane. EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

beginning with Horace Walpole's (1717-1797) The
Castle of Otranto (1765), whose horrific, hyperatmo-
spheric tales involved the reader in a new way, with an
increased emphasis on suspense and sensation; the
Victorian sensation novel, inaugurated by Wilkie
Collins's (1824-1889) The Woman in White (1860),
which adapted the sensational and atmospheric effects
of Gothic fiction to a more contemporary, familiar con-
text; and the early detective story, pioneered by Edgar
Allan Poe (1809-1849) (creator of C. Auguste Dupin,
1841) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) (creator of
Sherlock Holmes, 1887), whose adventures breathed an
air of momentous mystery into the modern, urban,
domestic world.

The roots of the thriller can be more generally
related to the rise of urban-industrial society in the nine-
teenth century, which created a new mass audience, along
with new popular entertainment forms to serve that
audience. One of the most important was the melodra-
matic theater, which placed a premium on action and
visual spectacle, including suspenseful, last-minute res-

cues of heroes and heroines tied to railroad tracks, men-
aced by buzz saws, and dangled from precipices.

Another relevant area of nineteenth-century popular
entertainment encompasses amusement parks, fair-
grounds, and their thrilling rides and attractions (e.g.,
the roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and fun house) . Like these
attractions, the thriller works primarily to evoke visceral,
gut-level feelings, such as suspense, fright, excitement,
speed, and motion, rather than subtle or weighty emo-
tions, such as tragedy, pathos, pity, love, and nostalgia.
The thriller stresses sensations more than sensitivity; it is
a sensational form.

Amusement parks and fairgrounds were among the
main venues for early motion picture exhibition, which
was dominated by novelty-oriented short films. A large
group of these films highlighted the sensation of motion
by placing the camera on moving vehicles such as trol-
leys, trains, boats, and elevators. Such sensations were
eventually incorporated into an early film genre known
as the chase film (of which the Edison Company's 1903
hit The Great Train Robbery is an unusually ambitious

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example), using a minimal story set-up as the spring-
board for an extended pursuit.

The period from 1907 to 1913 saw the movie
industry's growing domination by narrative filmmaking,
a development most closely identified with the American
director D. W. Griffith (1875-1948). Among the tech-
niques of film storytelling that Griffith refined, the one
most pertinent to the thriller is cross-cutting (i.e., cutting
back and forth between related actions occurring in dif-
ferent places). He applied this suspense-enhancing device
to melodramatic last-minute rescue situations in a num-
ber of short films made for the Biograph Company, such
as The Lonedale Operator (1911), in which a locomotive
engineer races to save his besieged sweetheart, and Death's
Marathon (1913), whose climax intermixes a distraught
wife, her suicide-bent husband, a telephone connection,
and a speeding automobile.

An eccentric contributor to the evolution of the
movie thriller was the serial, whose episodic structure
enabled action and suspense sequences to dominate a
lengthy narrative with a nearly constant succession of
thrills. Evolving in the mid-1910s, early American serials
frequently featured female protagonists in recurring sit-
uations of jeopardy, as indicated by such titles as The
Adventures of Kathlyn (1913), The Perils of Pauline
(1914), and The Mysteries of Myra (1916). In Europe,
the serial achieved greater artistic stature, particularly in
the work of France's Louis Feuillade (1873-1925). In his
celebrated serials Fantomas (1914), Les Vampires (1915-
1916), and Judex (1916), supercriminals and secret
societies transform sturdy bourgeois Paris into a surrepti-
tious, almost surreal battleground, riddled with trap
doors and hidden panels, infiltrated by hooded black-
clad figures who scurry over rooftops and shimmy down
drainpipes, and undermined by a constant succession of
reversals and disguises.

LANG, HITCHCOCK, SPIES, AND MONSTERS

Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who rivals Alfred Hitchcock as
the most important director in the evolution of the movie
thriller, served his apprenticeship on German adventure
series featuring exotic locales, Asian motifs, and
Feuillade-influenced supercriminals. He transposed these
exotic and adventurous concepts into the here and now
of postwar German society in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
{Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, 1922), an epic crime thriller
that paints a broad canvas of the chaos and decadence of
Weimar Germany, manipulated from behind the scenes
by the mastermind Mabuse.

In his later German classics — the thrillers Spione
{Spies, 1928), M (1931), and Das Testament der Dr.
Mabuse {The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933), and the
science fiction film Metropolis (1927) — Lang elaborated

his concept of the modern city as a duplicitous labyrinth
honeycombed with subterranean passages, infused with a
mood of pervasive conspiracy, and stratified into a flashy
overworld and a shadowy underworld that disconcert-
ingly mirror one another. Similar visions of the thriller
metropolis shape later thriller movies, including The
Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), which explores the con-
fusion of postwar Vienna from the top of a Ferris wheel
to the depths of the city sewers; Dirty Harry (Don Siegel,
1971), which traverses the heights and depths of San
Francisco in roller-coaster contours; and Blade Runner
(Ridley Scott, 1982), which imagines future Los Angeles
as a high-tech, low-rent dystopia.

Lang's Spies, in which professional German agents
battle a Mabuse-like supervillain, was the most distin-
guished spy movie of the silent era. In the 1930s, in
response to the growing international tensions of the
time, the spy genre rose to a new level of prominence
in both literature and film. This trend centered in Great
Britain, where the leading filmmaker involved was Alfred
Hitchcock. Like his literary contemporaries Eric Ambler
(1909-1998) and Graham Greene (1904-1991),
Hitchcock usually focused his spy stories not on profes-
sional agents but on ordinary citizens caught up in the
dirty business of espionage: In The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1934), a British couple on a Swiss holiday acci-
dentally learn of a planned political assassination; in The
39 Steps (1935), a London man stumbles upon a plot
to steal vital British military secrets. The "amateur-spy"
story enhances such thrilleresque qualities as the vulner-
ability of its inexperienced protagonists and the under-
mining of ordinary existence by alien forces.

Lang was one of the major directors associated with
the German expressionist cinema, whose moody style,
well suited for expressing such feelings as tension and
fear, exerted a strong influence on thriller directors
(including Hitchcock, who worked in Germany during
the expressionist cinema's heyday of the 1920s) and
thriller-related genres, such as film noir and the horror
film. The latter enjoyed its first sustained cycle in the
American cinema of the early 1930s, which produced
such legendary horror movies as Dracula (1931),
Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935). Much like the Gothic novel, these
films take place primarily in exotic, antiquated settings.
The more thrilleresque ploy of transposing traditional
horror elements, such as monsters and witches, into
commonplace, contemporary contexts was pioneered by
the series of subtle, suggestive low-budget horror films
including Cat People (1942) and The Seventh Victim
(1943) produced by Val Lewton (1904-1951) in the
early 1940s.

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Thrillers

ALFRED HITCHCOCK
b. London, England, 13 August 1899, d. 29 April 1980

The most famous of all film directors, and the one most
closely identified with the thriller, Alfred Hitchcock
completed his first film in 1925. However, he did not cement
his association with the thriller until the mid- 1930s, when he
directed five major spy films ( The Man Who Knew Too Much,
1934; The 39 Steps, 1935; Secret Agent, 1936; Sabotage, 1936;
and The Lady Vanishes, 1938). In this period, he developed
such Hitchcockian trademarks as the double chase (in which a
falsely suspected hero — such as Richard Hannay of The 39
Steps — must elude the authorities while he seeks the real
culprit), the placement of sinister activities in unexpected and
innocuous surroundings (the cozy pet shop where anarchist
bombs are manufactured in Sabotage), and the shifting among
different viewpoints to intensify and complexify suspense (the
agonizing scene in Secret Agent wherein the approaching doom
of a suspected traitor is intercut with the mounting anxiety of
his worried wife, his whining dog, and a guilt-ridden
collaborator in his assassination).

Hitchcock's interest in the spy thriller persisted after
his 1939 move from Britain to Hollywood with Saboteur
(1942) and Notorious (1946). However, he more frequently
explored other areas, especially the psychological crime
thriller, which stays closer to home as it concentrates on
ordinary people caught up in crime rather than on
professional criminals, detectives, or policemen. Shadow of a
Doubt (1943), in which a teenager suspects that her beloved
uncle is a notorious murderer, and Strangers on a Train
(1951), in which a clean-cut tennis star finds himself
embroiled in a madman's scheme to swap murders, are two
of Hitchcock's most celebrated ventures in this vein.

In the mid-1950s, Hitchcock embarked on a series of
mature masterpieces that represent the most impressive
sustained achievement in the history of the movie thriller:
Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest
(1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). This period
saw an enrichment of Hitchcock's already formidable
tactics of identification and point of view, more boldly
undermining the spectator's stability and evoking
conflicting responses to the action, while still maintaining

the basic drive of suspense. In Rear Window, our
overdetermined identification with the wheelchair-bound,
voyeuristic protagonist encourages a self-conscious
questioning not only of his motives but also of our own
motives as spectators. In Psycho, our strong attachment to
an embezzling secretary is abruptly severed and then
replaced by a split allegiance among a disturbingly
sympathetic psychopath and two more normal but less
compelling characters.

Hitchcock's identification with the thriller impeded
his prestige, especially in eras when socially conscious,
realist, and art films monopolized critical respect. The rise
of critical attitudes more receptive to genre films and
directorial authorship led to a major reevaluation of his
artistic stature in the 1950s and 1960s. Hitchcock's
thrillers — endlessly revived, written about, taught to film
students, and referenced by filmmakers — are now
enshrined as cultural monuments.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), The Man Who Knew
Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936),
The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a
Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train
(1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by
Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963),
Mamie (1964), Frenzy (1972)

FURTHER READING

Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, eds. A Hitchcock
Reader. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986.

Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings
and Interviews. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995.

McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and

Light. New York: Regan Books, 2003.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster,

1967.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock 's Films Revisited. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989.

Martin Rubin

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Thrillers

Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Psycho (1960). EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

HEYDAY OF THE AMERICAN CRIME THRILLER

After 1940, major developments in the movie thriller
centered around various phases of the crime thriller,
especially in the American cinema. This cycle began in
the detective genre, particularly the hard-boiled detective
story associated with such writers as Dashiell Hammett
(1894-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and
adapted by such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941),
Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946). In
contrast to the refined, detached sleuths of whod unit
authors like Agatha Christie (1890-1976) and S. S. Van
Dine (1887-1939), the hard-boiled style developed a
more vulnerable detective hero, susceptible to physical
violence and emotional entanglements.

The hard-boiled detective film fed directly into the
film noir movement that blossomed in America in the
mid- 1940s. First identified by French film enthusiasts,
film noir (literally, "black film") earns its dark name by
virtue of both its shadowy visual style and its pessimistic
themes. In the spectrum of thriller protagonists, the film
noir hero is one of the most profoundly vulnerable, with
a passive or susceptible personality that combines with
hostile outside forces to sweep him away: the milquetoast

husband (Edward G. Robinson) caught in a quagmire of
sexual temptation and murder in Scarlet Street (1945);
the weak-willed hitchhiker (Tom Neal) taken for a fate-
filled ride in Detour (1945); the nonchalant gumshoe
(Robert Mitchum) enmeshed by a femme fatale in Out
of the Past (1947); the gullible sailor (Orson Welles)
gobbled by a sharkish couple in The Lady from
Shanghai (1948).

Closely following film noir and providing a rational,
affirmative alternative to its nightmare world was the
semidocumentary crime film, featuring well-adjusted
organizational heroes such as James Stewart's crusading
Chicago reporter in Call Northside 777(1948) and Barry
Fitzgerald's veteran Manhattan cop in The Naked City
(1948). The most celebrated aspect of these films was
their use of factual story material and nonstudio loca-
tions, which supplied additional opportunities for artic-
ulating the frisson — the tension between the ordinary
world and its adventure-heightened state — that stirs the
feverish pulse of the thriller. For example, the climax of
He Walked by Night (1948) transforms Los Angeles's
utilitarian storm drains into a Phantom of the Opera
netherworld of concrete caverns and rippling shadows.

By the early 1950s, film noir and semidocumentary
elements had both been absorbed into the prevailing style
of the era's crime films. An impressive series of 1950s
police thrillers combined the organizational heroes of the
semidocumentary with the social and spiritual malaise of
film noir. "Flawed-cop" films such as Where the Sidewalk
Ends (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1952), and Touch of
Evil (1958) — with anguished, deeply compromised
policemen moving through expressively charged loca-
tions — represent a peak of character depth and moral
complexity in the history of the movie thriller.

Flourishing around the same time as the flawed-cop
cycle was the syndicate-gangster film. Whereas earlier
gangster films (e.g., Little Caesar, 1930; Scarface, 1932)
had drawn a sharp distinction between the criminal and
straight worlds, syndicate-gangster films (e.g., The Big
Heat, 1953; The Brothers Rico, 1957; Underworld
U.S.A., 1961) portray vast criminal organizations that
reach into every corner of ordinary American life and
become virtually indistinguishable from it, moving the
genre closer to the thriller's characteristic creation of a
double world.

MODERNIZATION, REVISION, AND REVIVAL

Whereas the classical period of the movie thriller
(ca. 1930-1960) was characterized by the entrenchment
of most of the central thriller-related genres (such as
spy, horror, detective, film noir), the period beginning
around 1960 was marked primarily by reconceptions of
those genres. Key thriller categories underwent major

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overhauls, ranging from subversive debunking (the detec-
tive film) to neoclassical revival (neo-noir) to revitaliza-
tion, both short-term (the spy film) and long-term (the
police film, the horror film).

Among the factors contributing to these new direc-
tions were the decline of the old Hollywood studio
system (exemplified by its self-enforced censorship sys-
tem, the Production Code) and the vogue of imported
foreign films, which achieved unprecedented influence in
the 1950s and 1960s. Internationally successful foreign
(especially French) thrillers such as Le salaire de la peur
{The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1952) and
Les Diaboliques {Diabolique, Henri-Georges Clouzot,
1955), Du Rififi chez les hommes {Rififi, Jules Dassin,
1955), A bout de souffle {Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard,
1960), and Tirez sur le pianiste {Shoot the Piano Player,
Francois Truffaut, 1960) flaunted a more ambivalent
morality, cynical tone, overt stylization, digressive struc-
ture, and explicit presentation of sex and violence than
did their American counterparts. These European models
left their mark on the increasingly permissive and exper-
imental Hollywood cinema of the 1960s and 1970s,
including a series of revisionist detective films {The
Long Goodbye, 1973; Chinatown, 1974; Night Moves,
1975) that questioned the effectiveness and relevance of
the traditional private eye hero so devastatingly that the
detective movie has never fully recovered.

An influential foreign phenomenon of a different
sort was the British-based James Bond series (inaugurated
by Dr. No in 1962), whose colorful escapades revitalized
a spy movie genre that had been constrained by the
political pressures of the early Cold War. However,
the Bond movies' diminished sense of the familiar and
the flippant invincibility of Bond himself moved the series
closer to the sphere of the adventure tale. More relevant to
the central concerns of the thriller was a countermovement
of pessimistic "anti-Bond" spy films, such as The Ipcress
File (1965), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), and The
Deadly Affair (1967), which featured compromised, vul-
nerable heroes (much like the flawed-cop films of 1950s)
and questioned the ethics and effectiveness of the conven-
tional genre hero (much like the revisionist detective films
of the 1970s).

VIOLENT GENRES

Rising on the heels of the 1960s spy boom was another
genre cycle featuring loose-cannon organizational heroes:
the modern police thriller, ignited by such hits as Bullitt
(1968), Dirty Harry (1971), and The French Connection
(1971). These films built up the justice-obsessed lawman
into a virtual superhero fighting to protect society where
official institutions have failed. Bullitt and The French

Connection popularized a prime demonstration of the
supercop's power: the extended, spectacular car chase.

Although the supercop had much in common with
James Bond and other superspies of the 1960s, he oper-
ated in a harsher, more conflict-ridden world, closer to
that of the anti-Bond spy films. One of the most signifi-
cant aspects of modern police thrillers is their hellish
vision of the modern metropolis, presented in lurid and
violent terms made possible by the demise of the
Production Code. The modern police thriller has been
a remarkably durable movement, encompassing the pop-
ular Lethal Weapon (1987-1998) and Die Hard (1988-
1995) series; major 1990s variants such as Speed (1994),
Seven (1995), and L.A. Confidential (1997); and a sig-
nificant portion of the influential Hong Kong action
cinema, whose police thrillers (especially John Woo's
Ying hung boon sik [A Better Tomorrow, 1986]; Die xue
shuang xiong [The Killer, 1989]; and Lashou shentan
[Hard-Boiled, 1992]) counterpoint the characteristic grit-
tiness of the genre with extravagant, operatic doses of
violence and melodrama.

A thriller genre even more dramatically affected by
the liberalization of censorship was the horror movie. Led
by both mainstream {Rosemary's Baby, 1968; The Exorcist,
1973) and low-budget {Night of the Living Dead, 1968;
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) hits, the horror
movie experienced a period of unprecedented richness
and innovation that lasted into the 1980s. Two factors
were especially crucial to the horror renaissance: the
explicitness of the films' visceral and violent content,
which earned them the label "splatter" films, and the
familiarity both of their settings (most resonantly, the
zombie-infested shopping mall in George A. Romero's
[b. 1940] Dawn of the Dead, 1978) and of their mon-
sters, who tended to be less grotesque and more unset-
tlingly human than those in previous and subsequent
manifestations of the horror film.

The horror movie boom was extended by the stalker
film. Epitomized by the long-running Halloween (begin-
ning in 1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare
on Elm Street (1984) series, the stalker film typically
depicts a group of young people being systematically
slaughtered by a prowling psychopath. The stalker-film
cycle retained the explicit gore and familiar, non-Gothic
settings of 1970s splatter films but stripped away much
of their ambivalence and subversiveness, depicting a more
clear-cut, externalized conflict against monsters who are
distanced, superhuman, and faceless. After a period of
decline, the stalker film was rejuvenated by Wes Craven's
Scream series (1996—2000), which added an extra layer of
hip postmodern self-referentiality to an already highly
self- aware subgenre.

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RECENT DIRECTIONS

Another recent thriller movement marked by historical
consciousness is neo-noir. Recycling and reconceiving
film noir's dark themes, flamboyant stylization, and con-
voluted structures, the neo-noir revival was spurred in the
1980s by such films as Body Heat (1981), Blood Simple
(1984), and Blue Velvet (1986), and it continued (with
an extra dollop of self-consciousness akin to that of the
Scream-\ed stalker revival) in Pulp Fiction (1994),
Memento (2000), Mulbolland Drive (2001), Femme
Fatale (2002), and Sin City (2005). As Hollywood films
of the post- Star Wars era became increasingly ruled by
superheroism, the neo-noir movement helped to keep alive
a more vulnerable, morally ambiguous concept of the
thriller hero. The highly adaptable neo-noir movement
has also flourished abroad, in such far-flung locales as
Scotland {Shallow Grave, 1994), Norway {Insomnia,
1997), China {Suzhou ha [Suzhou River, 2000]),
Argentina {Plata quemada [Burnt Money, 2001]), Iran
{Talaye sorkh [Crimson Gold, 2003]), and Latvia {Krisana
[Fallen, 2005]).

Related to both horror and neo-noir is a group of
1980s and 1990s films that could be called "intimate-
enemy" thrillers and are often described by the phrase

"the from hell" — for example, the one-night

stand from hell {Fatal Attraction, 1987), the nanny from
hell {The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, 1992), the room-
mate from hell {Single White Female, 1992). Anticipated
by Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) and Clint
Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), these films center
on the clinging, insinuating emotional bond forged by
the nemesis character who bedevils the hero.

After thriving in the 1990s with a number of
groundbreaking classics and commercial blockbusters
(including a throwback to the suggestive, nonviolent
horror thriller in 1999's The Blair Witch Project and
The Sixth Sense), the movie thriller of the new millen-
nium has fallen on leaner times. The box office has been
increasingly dominated by fantasy and adventure in the
vein of Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The
Chronicles of Narnia, while the more mundane realm of

the thriller has produced fewer big hits and trend-defining
innovators. The most consistent commercial success
has been achieved by a series of mid-decade horror mov-
ies (such as Cabin Fever, 2003; The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, 2003; Saw, 2004; Dawn of the Dead, 2004;
and When a Stranger Calls, 2006), many of them remakes
or derivatives of earlier hits, retailoring such venerable
horror themes as epidemic disease, sudden disaster,
and vulnerable isolation to address the anxieties of the
post-9/11 era. It remains to be seen what new directions
will revitalize this aging modern form that trades on our
ambivalent desires both to escape from and to remain
within the uneasy security of our increasingly downsized
world.

SEE ALSO Action and Adventure Films; B Movies; Crime
Films; Film Noir; Genre; Horror Films; Spy Films;
Violence

FURTHER READING

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula
Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976.

Denning, Michael. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the
British Spy Thriller. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1987.

Deny, Charles. The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of
Alfred Hitchcock. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.

Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings
and Interviews. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Harper, Ralph. The World of the Thriller. Cleveland: Press of
Case Western Reserve University, 1969.

Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of
Critical Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946.

Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979.

Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Shadoian, Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/
Crime Film. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.

Martin Rubin

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

261

TURKEY

The cinematograph first entered the Ottoman palace in
1896 as the sultan's entertainment. The following year,
the first public exhibition took place in the Sponeck pub
in Istanbul. Cinema remained itinerant in Turkey until
1908, when Sigmund Weinberg, a Romanian citizen of
Polish descent, opened the first movie theater, Pathe, in
Istanbul. By the 1920s cinema had become a part of
everyday life in the country's big cities, and a decade
later magazines were already referring to a social "illness"
called "cinemania." Cinema was the most popular mass
entertainment in Turkish popular culture until the
1970s, when television was introduced.

When Turkish filmmaking became an industry in the
1950s it was catering to an audience whose expectations
had been being shaped by foreign films since the 1920s.
American films have always had an immense influence on
mainstream Turkish cinema, and European films and
movements have served as consistent models for film-
makers in search of alternative cinemas. Despite the foreign
influences, Turkey's Westernization and modernization
movements dating back to the 1920s, together with polit-
ical and economical instabilities, have provided filmmakers
with a rich source of inspiration, sometimes culminating in
very original films. Nevertheless, ninety years of Turkish
filmmaking, which has produced some six thousand films
in a wide variety of genres and movements, lacks a coherent
identity and style as a national cinema.

THE OTTOMAN AND EARLY
REPUBLICAN PERIODS

The army officer Fuat Uzkinay's short documentary
Ayastefanos'taki Rus Abidesinin Yikilisi (The Demolition

of the Russian Monument at St. Stephen, 1914) is gen-
erally acknowledged as the first Turkish film. In 1915
General Enver, who was influenced by the practices of
the film unit of the German army, established the Army
Cinema Department with Weinberg as its first commis-
sioner. This department and, later, the semiofficial
organization the Veterans Association pioneered film
production during the Ottoman period with war docu-
mentaries, newsreels, and a few features. In 1916
Weinberg attempted to make the first feature film,
Himmet Aga'nin Izdivaci {The Marriage of Himmet
Ago), but the shooting was interrupted with the conscrip-
tion of the actors due to the Dardanelles War. The film
was completed by Uzkinay in 1918. Pence {The Claw,
1917) and Casus {The Spy, 1917) by the journalist Sedat
Simavi, were the first features shown to the public. The
first period of Turkish feature filmmaking, consisting of
eight films (mostly war and spy films and comedies
adapted from French plays and Turkish novels), ended
with the establishment of Turkey's first private studio,
Kemal Film, in 1922.

Turkey entered a fast process of modernization with
the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923.
Within the framework of republican projects intended
to create a new Turkish identity as well as a nation-state,
government reforms distanced the country from its
Islamic and Eastern past and brought it closer to con-
temporary western societies. Although the new republi-
can state included music and performing arts in its
modernization agenda, it did not touch cinema at all,
nor did it attempt to press cinema into service in the
construction of the new national identity. Lacking both
state support and intervention, Turkish filmmaking

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Turkey

began to take shape in the hands of Kemal Film and its
director, Muhsin Ertugrul (1892-1979), one of the lead-
ing actors and directors of Turkish theater at the time.

Ertugrul dominated Turkish cinema until the late
1930s with some thirty films that all looked like plays on
celluloid in terms of mise-en-scene and acting. After a
transition period (1939-1950) during which theater's
influence continued despite the end of Ertugrul's
monopoly, Turkish films began to have a more cinema-
tographic quality. Along with Lutfi Omer Akad, who was
the most significant director of the "cinematographers'
period," Metin Erksan (b. 1929), Atif Yilmaz (b. 1926),
Osman F. Seden (1924-1998), and Memduh Un
(b. 1920), were the pioneers of the development of a
cinematic language in Turkey during the 1950s.

YESILCAM (GREEN PINE) CINEMA

Cinema in Turkey meant mostly European and
American films until 1948, when the 75 percent munic-
ipal tax on exhibition was reduced to 25 percent for
indigenous films. After this tax break, which would be
the only state support for film until the mid-1980s, an
indigenous film industry based on private capital and
enterprise began to take shape in Yesilcam Street of
Beyoglu, Istanbul. With the rapid increase in the number
of film companies, domestic films, movie theaters, and
audiences, cinema ceased to be an elitist activity in big
cities and became a popular entertainment spreading to
even the small villages in Anatolia by the 1950s.

Yesilcam, which soon became the little Hollywood
of Turkey with its own genres and star system, enjoyed its
heyday between 1965 and 1975, with a yearly production
of two hundred to three hundred films. In 1966 Turkey
was fourth, just behind India, in world film production,
with 238 films. Many of these were moralistic melodra-
mas focusing on the theme of modernization and the
relationships between heterosexual couples from different
social and economic classes, which affirmed traditional
gender roles and social values against "degenerate" mod-
ern lifestyles: Surtuk (Streetwalker, 1965), Karagozlum
(My Dark Eyed One, 1967), Ask Mabudesi (Love
Goddess, 1969). Also popular were serial comedies:
Hababam Sinifi (Class of Hababam, 1975-1978),
Turist Omer {Omer the Tourist, 1964—1973), Tosun
Pasa (Tosun Pasha, 1976), Kapicilar Kirali (The King
of Doorkeepers, 1976); historical action and adventure
serials and films: Kara Murat (Karamurat, 1972-1978),
Malkocoglu (1966-1971), Adsiz Cengaver (The Warrior
Without a Name, 1970); and detective and gangster
films: Cingoz Recai (Recai the Shrewd, 1969), Vur Vur
Kac Kac (Hit Hit Run Run, 1972), Umutsuzlar {The
Hopeless Ones, 1971).

The expansion of television beginning in 1968, as
well as increasing social chaos and political violence,
brought an enormous reduction in movie attendance,
causing a crisis in Yesilcam towards the end of the
1970s. Because of that development, coupled with the
indifference of the state, whose interest in cinema was
limited to censorship until the mid-1980s, production
fell to only sixty-eight films in 1980. "Sex films" that
imitated Italian erotic comedies, and "arabesque films,"
which featured popular arabesque singers — the voices of
migrants from rural areas to big cities — were the two
major trends during the crisis that lasted from the end
of the 1970s through the 1980s.

OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM

Despite the popular appeal of Yesilcam, criticism that it
was a commercial cinema that steered away from social
problems and realities motivated two major movements
outside the mainstream. Alongside the social and the
political developments following the 27 May 1960 revo-
lution and the liberal social atmosphere created by the
new constitution, there appeared a group of films focus-
ing on the social problems of cities and villages, including
issues of class, migration, urbanization, unemployment,
and workers' rights. This "movement of social realism,"
which was influenced by Italian neorealism, began in
1960 with Metin Erksan's Gecelerin Otesi {Beyond the
Nights) and lasted until 1965 with films by Halit Refig
{Gurbet Kuslari [Birds of Exile, 1963]), Ertem Gorec
{Karanlikta Uyananlar [Those Awakening in the Dark,
1965]), and Duygu Sagiroglu {Bitmeyen Yol [The Road
That Has No End, 1965]). Most of the films associated
with the movement were commercial failures and had
to deal with state censorship, which had been in place
since 1939.

Another movement outside Yesilcam practices, the
"young Turkish cinema," emerged in the late 1970s with
a generation of new filmmakers following the realistic
path of Akad and Yilmaz Giiney (1937-1984), whose
Umut {Hope, 1970) became a milestone in Turkish
cinema. Many of these filmmakers, including Korhan
Yurtsever {Firatin Cinleri [The Spirits of Euphrates,
1977]), Yavuz Ozkan {Maden [The Mine, 1978]),
Erden Kiral {Kanal [The Canal, 1978]), Zeki Okten
{Suru [The Herd, 1978]), Yilmaz Giiney, and Serif Gon
(b. 1944) {Yol [The Way, 1982]), dealt with the social
problems of rural areas from a political perspective. Their
films also brought Turkish cinema international recog-
nition at foreign film festivals. In 1982 Yol shared the
Palme d'Or with Costa Gavras's Missing at the Cannes
Film Festival. However, like the films of the movement
of social realism, these films had to cope with censorship,
and they never attained the popularity of Yesilcam films.

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Turkey

POST-1980 TURKISH CINEMA

After a two-year military administration following the
1980 coup, Turkey entered a new stage of social change
with the capitalistic policies of the new civil government.
Among the major film trends in the 1980s were films
dealing with the coup's psychological effects on individ-
uals, especially intellectuals; "women's fdms" paralleling
the rise of feminism in Turkey and depicting female
characters in search of their identities and liberty; and
fdms dealing with cinematic practice itself in terms of
the fdmmaker's social roles, creative desires, and
disappointments.

Turkish cinema underwent another crisis at the end
of the 1980s, mainly due to the expansion of color TV
broadcasting, the video boom, increasing production
costs, and declining movie attendance. Beginning in
1987 Warner Bros, and United International Pictures
(UIP), the distributor of the fdms of Paramount and

Universal, were given permission to set up exhibition
and distribution agencies in Turkey. In 1989 only 13
of the 215 films shown in the country were Turkish
fdms. By the 1990s Yesilcam had completely collapsed,
having lost its audience to private TV channels and
American blockbusters.

In 1990 Turkey became a member of Eurimages, the
Council of Europe's fund for the joint production, dis-
tribution, and exhibition of European cinematographic
works, and in the same year, the Turkish Ministry of
Culture began to allocate funds to selected fdms. Those
factors, combined with the relaxation of censorship
beginning in 1 986 and the expansion of private sponsor-
ship, contributed to the resurrection of Turkish cinema
in the 1990s. Several joint productions supported by
Eurimages and the Ministry of Culture, such as Yavuz
Turgul's Eskiya {The Bandit, 1996), were enormously
popular with fdmgoers. Another of these, Vizontele

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Turkey

(2001), about the introduction of television in a small
Anatolian town, topped the domestic box office with
more than three million admissions. Today Turkish
cinema progresses with a yearly production of ten to
eighteen films. Heavy media promotion, the featuring
of well-known celebrities such as showmen and models,
and high production values ensure their popularity.
Besides mainstream films that reveal the influence of
Hollywood action cinema, films by new young inde-
pendent directors such as Zeki Demirkubuz and Nuri
Bilge Ceylan promise a bright future for Turkish cinema.
Ceylan's Uzak {Distant, 2002) won the Grand Jury Prize
at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

FURTHER READING

Erdogan, Nezih, and Deniz Gokturk. "Turkish Cinema." In
Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Cinemas,
edited by Oliver Leaman, 533-573. London: Routledge,
2002.

Hal, Ersan. "On Turkish Cinema." In Film and Politics in the
Third World, edited by John D. H. Downing, 119-129. New
York: Autonomedia, 1987.

Robins, Kevin, and Asu Aksoy. "Deep Nation: The National
Question and Turkish Cinema Culture." In Cinema and
Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott Mckenzie, 203-221.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Woodhead, Christine, ed. Turkish Cinema: An Introduction.
London: SOAS, 1989.

Dilek Kaya Mutlu

266

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Twentieth Century Fox (or 20th Century Fox) was
among the first and the last major Hollywood studios
to coalesce, initially emerging in the mid-teens as the Fox
Film Corporation but not taking on its ultimate config-
uration until a 1935 merger with 20th Century Pictures,
an upstart independent production company run by the
inimitable Darryl F. Zanuck (1902-1979). Although the
Fox Film Corporation had been an important industry
force, not until the 20th Century merger and the instal-
lation of Zanuck as production chief did the studio
finally come into its own. Arguably the top production
executive of the studio era, Zanuck possessed a unique
combination of filmmaking and management skills, as
well as keen commercial instincts. Through some three
decades under Zanuck, Fox's output struck an effective
balance of lightweight entertainment and powerful
drama — The Mark of Zorro and The Grapes of Wrath in
the same year (1940), for instance, both of which Zanuck
himself produced. Zanuck also enabled 20th Century
Fox to sustain Hollywood's traditional mode of produc-
tion and marketing strategies far longer than the other
studios — well into the 1960s, in fact, when a few big hits
like The Sound of Music (1965) were offset by too many
costly flops, bringing an end to Zanuck's regime. Fox
quickly adapted to the changing industry, enjoying a
massive surge with the release of Star Wars (1977) and
its first two sequels, which fashioned the consummate
New Hollywood movie franchise and carried Fox into
the 1980s.

The studio underwent another historic transition in
the mid-1980s with the installation of Barry Diller
(b. 1942) as president in 1984, and the ensuing purchase
of the studio by Rupert Murdoch's (b. 1931) global

media giant, News Corporation. While Diller had the
commercial and creative instincts that Fox had been
lacking since Zanuck's departure, Murdoch brought mas-
sive resources and an even broader vision. Together they
created a new breed of media conglomerate and funda-
mentally recast the studio, beginning with the launch of
Fox Broadcasting in 1985-1986. The tremendous suc-
cess of the movie-television "synergy" at Fox changed the
landscape of American media, auguring the later studio-
network amalgams of Disney-ABC, Paramount-CBS,
and NBC-Universal. Moreover, the current alignment
of News Corp., with its multiple conduits to media
consumers, and Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent
company of 20th Century Fox, has reformulated vertical
integration for the cable and digital delivery era. So
although the Fox of the early twenty-first century is a
far cry from the movie studio(s) that generated it, many
obvious affinities and connections persist. There is an
affinity, too, between Murdoch, who controlled News
Corp. as of 2005, and William Fox (1879-1952), whose
equally boundless vision and reckless expansionism laid
the groundwork for Murdoch's vast media empire.

THE FOX FILM CORPORATION AND
TWENTIETH CENTURY PICTURES

Twentieth Century Fox began as a chain of penny
arcades and nickelodeons operated in the early 1900s
by William Fox, a young Jewish immigrant (born in
Tulchva, Hungary, in 1879) with enormous entrepreneu-
rial drive and vision. Like other industry pioneers, most
notably Universal's Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), Fox
moved into production and distribution to ensure a flow

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

267

Twentieth Century Fox

DARRYL F. ZANUCK
b. Wahoo, Nebraska, 5 September 1902, d. 22 December 1979

Among Hollywood's pioneering producers and studio
heads, Darryl Zanuck was unique for his longevity at the
helm of the studio he co-founded, 20th Century Fox, as
well as for his intense involvement in the filmmaking
process. Along with Irving Thalberg and David Selznick,
Zanuck was one of Hollywood's first-generation boy
wonders, supervising production at a major studio
(Warner Bros.) while still in his twenties. But Zanuck
alone among top Hollywood executives rose through the
creative ranks (as a writer at Warner), and he alone not
only approved and supervised all A-class production on his
lot but was also actively engaged in production. In some
three decades atop Fox, it was not uncommon for Zanuck
to take a script home and rewrite it over a weekend or to
substantially rework a screenplay. Zanuck closely
supervised post-production, often writing and even
directing retakes or added scenes (including sequences in
both The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, and My Darling
Clementine, 1946). Zanuck took well-deserved
producer credit on scores of 20th Century Fox
films, including many of its top hits and now-canonized
classics.

Zanuck was the most dynamic and colorful of the
early studio heads. Diminutive, hyperaggressive, and
supremely confident, he was a bantam battler and a
control freak, a polo-field assailant and casting-couch
predator. He was also a rare Midwestern WASP with
creative talent within a generation of studio bosses
dominated by first- and second-generation eastern
European Jews with retail trade experience. Zanuck
learned the business, of course, and he remained an astute
student of cinema both as a commercial industry and an
art form — one of those rare Hollywood executives able, in
F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous phrase, "to keep the whole
equation of pictures in their heads."

Zanuck helped create several important movie cycles,
notably the gangster films and historical biopics of the

1930s and the social problem dramas of the 1940s, and he
proved equally adept at producing Fox's dual output of
entertaining "hokum" (his term) and "serious" pictures.
He was the only top studio executive to join the military
and to see active duty (as a colonel in the Signal Corps)
during World War II, and his pet wartime project was the
biopic Wilson ( 1 944) , which dramatized Woodrow
Wilson's League of Nations to implicitly proclaim
Zanuck's own support of the nascent United Nations. His
postwar commitment to social problem dramas drew fire
from the House Un-American Activities Committee as
"un-American," and although he sustained that
production cycle, Zanuck also joined the other studio
bosses in capitulating to the blacklist.

Zanuck was an inveterate risk taker throughout his
career. Examples are Fox's gamble on CinemaScope and
Zanuck's subsequent venture into independent production
in the 1950s and his blockbuster-scale productions after
returning to Fox in the 1960s.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Lloyd's of London (1936), Jesse James (1939), How Green Was
My Valley (1941), Wilson (1944), Gentleman's Agreement
(1947), All About Eve (1950), The Man in the Grey Flannel
Suit (1956), The Longest Day (1962), The Agony and the
Ecstasy (1965)

FURTHER READING

Behlmer, Rudy, ed. Memo From Darry F. Zanuck: The Golden
Years at Twentieth Century Fox. New York: Grove Press,
1993.

Custen, George F. Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck
and the Culture of Hollywood. New York: Basic Books,

1997.

Mosley, Leonard. Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's
Last Tycoon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

Zanuck, Darryl F., with Mel Gussow. Don't Say Yes Until L
Finish Talking. New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Thomas Schatz

of product for his growing theater chain and soon came
into conflict with the Motion Picture Patents Company,
also known as the Edison Trust. Fox was one of the
Trust's most aggressive combatants, challenging its
hegemony in the courts and in the marketplace. Fox,

Laemmle, and the other so-called independents prevailed,
and soon they were creating a vertically integrated oli-
gopoly of their own. In 1915 Fox, already a leading
exhibitor, formally created the Fox Film Company via
the merger of his established production and distribution

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Twentieth Century Fox

Darryl F. Zanuck. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED by
PERMISSION.

companies. The following year he moved his modest
production operation to Hollywood, opening a studio
on the corner of Sunset and Western. That began a
period of tremendous growth for Fox, spurred by its
two recent star discoveries, Theda Bara (1885-1955)
and William Farnum (1876-1953). Under longtime
production chief Winfield Sheehan (1883-1945), the
studio turned out a winning combination of A-class star
vehicles, most notably its exotic Bara pictures directed by
J. Gordon Edwards (1867-1925), such as Salome (1918)
and The Siren's Song (1919), alongside popular two-reel
westerns starring Tom Mix (1880-1940) and Buck Jones
(1889-1942).

The Fox Film Company reached a peak of sorts in
the late silent era when, though it had few top stars under
contract, its roster of staff directors included Raoul
Walsh (1887-1980), Frank Borzage (1893-1962), John
Ford (1894-1973), Howard Hawks (1896-1977), and
F. W. Murnau (1888-1931). Sheehan tended to be a
hands-off executive, so these directors enjoyed consider-
able control of their projects, which included such mas-
terworks as Walsh's What Price Glory (1926), Borzage's
Seventh Heaven (1927), and Murnau's Sunrise (1927),

along with solid genre work like Ford's Three Bad Men
(1926) and Hawks's A Girl in Every Port (1928). Most of
these films contained a musical score and sound effects,
as Fox in 1926 and 1927 was vying with Warner Bros, to
crack the sound barrier via its Movietone sound-on-film
system. In 1928 Fox completed construction on its new
studio in Westwood (West Hollywood), dubbed
"Movietone City," and also began experimenting with
widescreen and 70mm pictures — most notably for The
Big Trail (1930), a spectacular western directed by Walsh
and starring John Wayne (1907-1979) in his first sig-
nificant leading role. The film flopped, weakening the
market for A-class westerns and relegating Wayne to a
decade of B-western roles, while also adding to Fox's
growing list of woes.

It was in 1930, in fact, that William Fox's chronic
overreaching finally caught up with him. As his company
flourished in 1928 and 1929, Fox borrowed heavily to
further upgrade production and expand theater operations,
to promote Fox's sound and widescreen technologies,
and also, remarkably enough, to finance a hostile take-
over bid to acquire Loew's/MGM. But then a series of
events in 1929, including a near-fatal car accident, a
threatened federal antitrust suit (over the Loew's take-
over), and the stock market crash, devastated Fox both
physically and financially. Overextended, incapacitated,
and vulnerable to hostile creditors, Fox was ousted in
1930 and replaced as president by one of those creditors,
Harley Clarke, while Sheehan remained head of produc-
tion. There were some upbeat developments in the early
sound era, especially on the talent front. Janet Gaynor
(1906-1984), who burst to stardom in Seventh Heaven
and Sunrise, enjoyed a successful transition to sound via
two 1929 musical hits, Happy Days and Sunny Side Up,
while the recently signed Will Rogers (1879-1935),
longtime film (and vaudeville) personality, suddenly
surged to top stardom in the sound era. But these rising
stars could not stem the impact of the Depression, and
the studio's fortunes faded badly after Fox's ouster. In
1932 Clarke was replaced by Sidney Kent, who proved to
be a capable chief executive but could not forestall the
inevitable. In 1933 Fox West Coast Theaters, the studio's
exhibition arm — and, in effect, its parent company —
went into receivership.

That same year, Darryl F. Zanuck left his position as
production chief at Warner Bros, to join forces with
Joseph Schenck (1878-1961) (brother of Nick Schenck,
president of Loew's, Inc.) to create 20th Century
Pictures, an independent production company designed
to release A-class pictures through United Artists (UA).
20th Century was an immediate success, turning out
some twenty films in the next two years, including
Moulin Rouge (1934), The House of Rothschild (1934),
Les Miserables (1935), and The Call of the Wild (1935).

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Twentieth Century Fox

Although 20th supplied the bulk of UA's output,
repeated efforts by Schenck and Zanuck to form a part-
nership with UA were thwarted by two of its cofounders,
Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) and Mary Pickford
(1892—1979), who still controlled the company. So
Schenck and Zanuck were receptive to Sidney Kent's
suggestion in early 1935 that they realign 20th with Fox,
which had continued to produce after declaring bank-
ruptcy but was still in disarray. What Kent wanted was a
studio executive team, but Schenck and Zanuck saw a far
greater opportunity for their newly created company. They
not only maneuvered the deal into a veritable merger, they
made it one in which 20th Century took the lead in terms
of the corporate title, the logo, the remuneration, and
corporate control. In a deal executed in May 1935, the
two companies formed 20th Century Fox. Kent remained
president, handling sales and theater operations out of
New York, and Schenck became board chairman and
nominal head of the studio, but 20th Century Fox clearly
was Darryl Zanuck's domain. He replaced Sheehan as vice
president in charge of production at a salary of $5,000 per
week (the highest salary of the three top executives) plus
10 percent of the gross, and he assumed complete control
of the studio — a position he would retain for most of the
next thirty-five years.

THE CLASSICAL ERA

The 20th Century Fox merger was an instant success by
any measure, especially in terms of production efficiency,
quality pictures, increased revenues, and profits. The
success came relatively quickly, but only after Zanuck
did some extensive house-cleaning in terms of both con-
tract talent and projects in development. Zanuck brought
with him from 20th a few key artists and technicians,
notably the composer Alfred Newman (1901-1970) and
editor Barbara McLean (1903-1996) (essentially a co-
editor with Zanuck, who directly supervised the cutting
of all top productions). He retained some of Fox's top
talent but invariably strengthened their departments. The
veteran Fox cinematographers Ernest Palmer (1885—
1978) and Arthur Miller (1895-1970) were joined by
the Technicolor specialist Leon Shamroy (1901-1974),
for instance, and the production designer William
Sandorhazi was joined in the early Zanuck era by Boris
Leven (1908-1986), Nathan Juran (1907-2002), James
Basevi (1890-1962), and Lyle Wheeler (1905-1990).
Zanuck's most significant efforts involved a limited pool
of contract stars. Fox star Will Rogers was just reaching
the very height of his career in 1935, and Shirley Temple
(b. 1928), already a seasoned movie veteran at age seven,
was just breaking through to top stardom (and top bill-
ing). Rogers starred in two sizable hits in 1935, the lavish
period comedies Steamboat Round the Bend and In Old
Kentucky, but was killed in a plane crash in August.

Offsetting this unfortunate loss was Temple's emergence
as Hollywood's top star in 1935 on the strength of
multiple hits, including The Little Colonel and Curly
Top; and her star continued to soar in Poor Little Rich
Girl (1936), Heidi (1937), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm (1938). Meanwhile, Zanuck quickly expanded the
studio's star stable, signing a few established stars like
Loretta Young (1913-2000) but relying primarily on
recently or newly signed young talent like Tyrone
Power (1913-1958), Alice Faye (1915-1998), Henry
Fonda (1905-1982), Sonja Henie (1912-1969), and
Don Ameche (1908-1993).

Zanuck supervised virtually all of the top feature
production at Fox's Westwood plant, including some
fifteen to twenty pictures per year that he personally
produced. (From 1936 until he left for military duty in
1942, Zanuck was the credited producer on over 110
films.) Additionally, he monitored Sol Wurtzel's (1890-
1958) B-movie operation on the Western Ave. lot, which
accounted for nearly half of Fox's output. Thus Zanuck
assumed a very different role at Fox from the one he had
held as production chief at Warner Bros. Although he
had been a "creative executive" at Warner's, now he was
more actively engaged in production and more directly
involved in shaping the rapidly emerging house style.
Moreover, that style was generally brighter, more upbeat,
and more technically polished at 20th Century Fox,
particularly in the years just after the merger. This
undoubtedly was a function of the resources available at
Fox, as well as changes in the national temperament and
Zanuck's own development as a filmmaker and purveyor
of popular entertainment. Relying on a group of capable
but undistinguished contract directors and his cadre
of newly signed, would-be stars, Zanuck developed a
melange of energetic musicals, light comedy-drama, quasi-
historical biopics, and adventure yarns steeped in sentimen-
tal Americana — or what Zanuck himself termed "hokum."
Typical of 20th Century Fox's output in the mid- 1930s
were films like Lloyd's of London (1936), In Old Chicago
(1937), and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), which may
have lacked critical prestige but did excellent business.

In 1 939 and 1 940 Zanuck began a campaign to upgrade
the studio's output, signing the top directors John Ford,
Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Henry King (1886-1982),
and Henry Hathaway (1898-1985), and assigning them
increasingly ambitious projects. This resulted in superior
product but also a growing rift in Fox's house style. Ford
and Lang tended to take on more "serious" and artisti-
cally estimable films, often literary adaptations or biopics
shot in black and white. Hathaway and King, conversely,
directed more polished and blatandy "commercial" films —
more accomplished versions, often in Technicolor, of the
period musicals and quasi-historical adventures that Fox
already was producing. Fox's rising stars tended to reinforce

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Twentieth Century Fox

HENRY FONDA
b. Grand Island, Nebraska, 16 May 1905, d. 12 August 1982

Henry Fonda appeared in fewer than a dozen films for
20th Century Fox, but those early roles effectively shaped
his enduring persona — a common man of quiet decency,
Midwestern stoicism, homespun virtue, and reluctant
heroism. Fonda never forgave Darryl Zanuck for forcing
him into a long-term contract to get the role of Tom Joad
in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but that transaction gave
Fonda a career-defining role and brought 20th Century
Fox precisely the kind of critical acclaim and industry
prestige that Zanuck had hoped for.

Fonda spent his youth in Omaha, where he began an
acting career that took him to Broadway. His role in a hit
play, The Farmer Takes a Wife, brought him to Hollywood
for the screen version, which was produced by Fox — as
was Fonda's second picture, Way Down East — in 1935 just
before the merger with 20th Century. Under contract to
the independent producer Walter Wanger, Fonda worked
primarily as a romantic co-star opposite leading ladies like
Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and his ex-wife Margaret
Sullavan. In his first two pictures for 20th Century Fox,
Fonda was second-billed to Tyrone Power in Jesse James
and Don Ameche in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
(both 1939). Then, at the behest of John Ford, Zanuck
gave Fonda the title role in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).
This was the first of three consecutive projects with the
director, who understood precisely how to make use of
Fonda's reticent gallantry and resolute sense of justice, not
to mention his lanky frame and angular features. Fonda
was second-billed to Claudette Colbert in Drums Along the
Mohawk (1939), a frontier drama that gave further weight
to his epic-historic persona; but that persona took on a
truly mythic dimension with his portrayal of a
contemporary prairie nomad, the displaced Okie Tom

Joad, in The Grapes of Wrath. Based on John Steinbeck's
1939 bestseller, the film is a masterwork of poetic realism
and social conscience, with Ford's understated
semidocumentary approach perfectly suited to Fonda's
unaffected, natural acting style.

Zanuck cast him in more blatantly commercial
pictures, but some of his best work was done in loan-out
comedy roles, like Paramount's All About Eve (1941) and
Warner's The Male Animal (1942) . Fonda joined the Navy
in 1942, his three-year hiatus bracketed by two memorable
Fox westerns, The Ox-Bow Incident ( 1 943) , in which he
played a drifter who tries unsuccessfully to stop a lynching,
and My Darling Clementine (1946), a Ford-directed biopic
of Wyatt Earp. Once his Fox contract expired in 1947,
Fonda's film career slowed considerably, as he became a
more selective freelance star and spent a good deal of time
back on Broadway. Among his notable later performances
are the besieged president in Fail-Safe (1964) and the
retired professor in his last film, On Golden Pond (1981).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

You Only Live Once (1937), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939),
Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), The Lady Eve (1941), The Ox-Bow Incident
(1943), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache
(1948), Mister Roberts (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), 12
Angry Men (1957), How the West Was Won (1962), Fail-
Safe (1964), On Golden Pond (1981)

FURTHER READING

Fonda, Henry, with Howard Teichmann. Fonda: My Life.

New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984.
McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York:

St. Martin's, 2003.

Thor,

Schatz

this divide. Tyrone Power, for instance, was featured in
quintessential hokum like Jesse James (King, 1939), Johnny
Apollo (Hathaway, 1940), and Brigham Young (Hathaway,
1940), whereas Henry Fonda starred in the Ford-directed
classics Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath,
and in Lang's dark, offbeat sequel to the Jesse James biopic,
The Return of Frank James (1940). Zanuck himself pro-
duced films on both sides of this divide, although his
rapport with the more cinematically accomplished directors,

particularly Ford, was often strained. Zanuck did reward
Ford handsomely for his work, however, paying him a salary
in 1939 of $235,000, just short of his own. And although
Ford did some of his best work at this time on independent
productions like Stagecoach (1939), his work with Zanuck at
Fox from 1939 through 1941 was simply unparalleled,
culminating in How Green Was My Valley (1941), a critically
acclaimed hit that won Oscars® for best picture and best
director.

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271

Twentieth Century Fox

Henry Fonda. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Like all of the major studios, 20th Century Fox
underwent significant changes during World War II. As
revenues and profits surged, output was reduced during
the war from roughly fifty releases to one-half that total,
and B-movie production was phased out altogether. Fox
also saw wholesale changes in the executive ranks. In
1941 Joe Schenck began serving a federal prison term
(for income tax evasion related to a labor union scandal);
in 1942 Zanuck joined the Signal Corps, becoming the
only top studio executive to serve overseas; and Sidney
Kent died suddenly of a heart attack. This created a void
in the studio's executive ranks, which the Fox board
filled by appointing Spyros Skouras (1893-1971), head
of the company's theater operations, as company pres-
ident — a position he would hold for the next twenty
years.

In terms of wartime production trends, Fox sustained
the prewar split between heavier drama and lightweight fare.
The more ambitious, substantial films included The Ox-Bow
Incident (1943), a somber western involving lynch-mob
violence and social injustice; The Song ofBemadette (1943),
a "fictionalized biography" about the girl who saw visions of
the Virgin Mary at Lourdes; and Zanuck's pet project, Wilson
(1944), a biopic that centered on Woodrow Wilson's

creation of the League of Nations (and a major box-office
disappointment). The more upbeat commercial films
were invariably star vehicles — costume adventures and
war films with Tyrone Power like The Black Swan
(1942) and Crash Dive (1943), and a run of Betty
Grable (1916—1973) musical hits including Springtime
in the Rockies (1942), Coney Island (1943), Pin Up Girl

(1944) , and Diamond Horseshoe (1945). Grable emerged
during the war as Fox's top star and a bona fide national
icon — an unabashedly sexy, brassy blonde with "million
dollar legs" whose ubiquitous pin-up became a symbol of
American pluck and playful sexuality.

Fox continued to thrive in the immediate postwar era,
enjoying record revenues in 1946 and then returning to
wartime levels through the late 1940s. The new executive
setup proved effective, with Skouras operating primarily out
of New York while Zanuck ran the studio and supervised
production. Zanuck continued to produce Fox's top films
but handled far fewer than he had a decade earlier — only
fifteen films from 1945 to 1950, including My Darling
Clementine (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The
Snake Pit (1948), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), and All
About Eve (1950). Reducing his own producing load,
Zanuck allowed some of his top writers and directors to
produce their own films. The most prominent was Otto
Preminger (1906-1986), who enjoyed a career breakthrough
as producer-director on laura (1944), a noir thriller that
featured two fast- rising Fox stars, Gene Tierney (1920—
1991) and Dana Andrews (1909-1992), and made a
sudden star of the middle-aged stage actor Clifton Webb
(1889-1966), who also became a fixture at Fox. After that
surprise hit, Preminger became one of the busiest and most
successful hyphenates on the lot, serving as producer-
director on Centennial Summer (1946), Daisy Kenyon
(1947), Whirlpool (1949), and Where the Sidewalk Ends
(1950).

Fox's house style underwent subtle but significant
adjustments in the postwar era, as the penchant for
darker, heavier drama became more pronounced. To be
sure, there were the occasional Grable musicals and
Power costumers — films like Mother Wore Tights and
Captain from Castile, two of the studio's biggest 1947
hits. But these upbeat releases were far outweighed by a
steady output of realistic crime films, trenchant melodra-
mas, stylized noir thrillers, and "social problem films."
Fox started the postwar trend toward location shooting
and "police procedurals" with The House on 92nd Street

(1945) , shot entirely on location in New York City, and
then pursued the trend more vigorously than any other
studio. Meanwhile, a pervasive darkness crept into nearly
all of Fox's films, even Technicolor melodramas like
Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Particularly dark were
Fox's social problem films — Gentleman's Agreement, The
Snake Pit, Pinky (1949), and others — which took on

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Twentieth Century Fox

(Left to right) Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Bette Davis, and Anne Baxter in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950),
one of RKO's best postwar films. * ™ AND COPYRIGHT © 20TH CENTURY fox FILM CORP./COURTESY EVERETT collection.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

issues like racism and mental illness. In fact, Zanuck
and Fox were still presenting bleak, probing portraits
of the contemporary American condition in the late
1940s, long after the 1947 House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) investigation and con-
servative backlash had induced the other Hollywood
studios to play it safe. That impulse culminated in
1950 with noir thrillers like Whirlpool, Night and the
City, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, social dramas like
Panic in the Streets and No Way Out, and even westerns
like The Gunfighter and Broken Arrow, although by the
early 1950s (and the second HUAC investigation), Fox
too was backing away from films that might be con-
strued as un-American.

FROM THE ZANUCK ERA
TO THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

The year 1950 also marked the release of All About Eve,
Fox's consummate postwar success. Produced by Zanuck,

written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-
1993), the film starred Bette Davis (1908-1989) as a
veteran stage star struggling with advancing age and a
declining career, and its many awards included Oscars®
for best picture, director, and screenplay. All About Eve
also featured Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) in a bit
part — one of several in the early 1950s that paved the
way to leading roles and top stardom. A worthy successor
to Betty Grable, Monroe was the fifties-era blonde
bombshell whose star vehicles — Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire (both 1953), River
of No Return (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and
others — were money in the till for Fox. These hits were
also highlights in an otherwise lackluster period, when
Fox's only other real star was its widescreen
CinemaScope format, which debuted in The Robe
(1953), turning that routine biblical yarn into a major
hit and persuading Zanuck to produce all of the studio's
releases in CinemaScope.

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273

Twentieth Century Fox

The emphasis on Monroe and widescreen spectacles
underscored a shift to a more upbeat, conservative ethos
at Fox, which intensified when Zanuck resigned his
executive post in 1956 to pursue independent production
in France and installed producer Buddy Adler (1909—
1960) as head of the studio. That led to a particularly
fallow period for Fox, which by 1960—1961 was showing
net losses for the first time in decades — and threatened to
grow much worse in light of the now-legendary budget
overruns on Cleopatra (1963). Problems on that film,
along with the success of Zanuck's own D-Day drama,
The Longest Day (1962), prompted his return to Fox to
salvage Cleopatra and reverse the studio's declining for-
tunes. Zanuck assumed the presidency of Fox in August
1962, replacing Skouras, and he appointed his son
Richard (b. 1934) head of production. Within a year
the studio was showing a profit, and in 1965 it enjoyed
monumental success with The Sound of Music, whose $80
million in rental receipts made it Hollywood's all-time
biggest hit.

Inspired by the runaway success of that film, Fox
embarked on a woefully ill-advised production campaign
that resulted in the musical extravaganzas Doctor Dolittle
(1967), Star! (1968), and Hello, Dolly! (1969), and the
wildly ambitious war epic, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a
US-Japanese co-production about the attack on Pearl
Harbor. These and other big-budget projects failed at
the box office, causing cumulative net losses in 1969—
1970 of just over $100 million, contributing mightily to
an industry-wide recession and to the ouster of Richard
Zanuck in 1970 and Darryl Zanuck in 1971. At that
point 20th Century Fox came under control of its board
chairman, Dennis Stanfill, although like many of the
studios at the time, it was without effective leadership,
direction, or control. Interestingly enough, Fox did
release some modest offbeat hits in that era, including
Planet of the Apes (1968), which spun off several film
sequels and TV series; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid (1969), a prototypical action-adventure buddy movie
co-starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford; and
breakthrough hits by two of the era's leading auteurs:
Robert Altman's (b. 1925) M*A*S*H (1970) and
William Friedkin's (b. 1935) The French Connection
(1971).

The French Connection gave Fox another batch of
Oscars®, including best picture and best director, and
helped spur a recovery that accelerated in 1973-1974
with the arrival of Alan Ladd Jr. (b. 1937) as head of
production. Under Ladd, Fox turned out solid, predict-
able hits like The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Omen
(1976), along with some inspired comedy hits like Young
Frankenstein (1974), one of several Mel Brooks (b. 1926)
films done at Fox, and Silver Streak (1976). The studio's
fortunes were forever changed with the 1977 release of

George Lucas's (b. 1944) space epic, Star Wars, which
cost roughly $13 million and grossed well over $200
million, giving Fox another all-time box-office hit. But
unfortunately for Fox, Ladd signed away the sequel
rights to Lucas in lieu of his final payment as writer-
director, which meant that Fox would collect only dis-
tribution fees on subsequent releases — which were
among the most successful films of their respective
release years (1980, 1983, 1999, 2003, and 2005).
Other Fox hits from the Ladd era included several
exceptional women's pictures, Julia, The Turning Point
(both 1977), and An Unmarried Woman (1978), and
two of the top box-office hits of 1979, Alien and
Breaking Away.

Ladd left for independent production that same year,
initiating a period of turmoil at Fox that intensified with
the sale of the studio to the oil magnate Marvin Davis in
1981, and then the brief, unsuccessful tenures of Alan
Hirschfield as chief executive and Sherry Lansing
(b. 1944) as production head. Both Hirschfield and
Lansing were out by 1983, as Fox continued to struggle
and Davis's interest waned; but the company's fortunes
began to turn in 1984 with the hiring of Barry Diller as
president and CEO. At age forty-two, Diller already had
a remarkable track record in US media, starting in the
late 1960s at ABC where he developed the TV-movie
and miniseries operations, and then at Paramount, where
in 1974 he was named chairman of the studio's motion
picture and television divisions. Diller found Fox to be
undercapitalized and Davis unwilling to invest, so he
began looking for outside investors. He found one in
Rupert Murdoch, an Australian-born media baron whose
global publishing empire, News Corp., had begun rap-
idly expanding into media. Impressed by Diller and the
opportunity at hand, which was enhanced substantially
by the deregulation of US media under President Ronald
Reagan (1911-2004), Murdoch decided to invest heav-
ily, purchasing half-ownership of Fox in 1984 and com-
pleting the acquisition in 1985 (for a bargain total price
of $575 million). Murdoch also became a naturalized US
citizen in 1985 to satisfy FCC regulations that prohibited
foreign ownership of TV stations.

At that point Murdoch and Diller began assembling
the necessary resources to create Fox Broadcasting, a
fourth US television network to compete with ABC,
CBS, and NBC. Although launching Fox-TV was a bold
and visionary move, the rollout was done slowly and
deliberately, beginning with a late night program in
October 1986 and gradually working into prime time
and then into a weeklong evening schedule as Fox
acquired its own TV stations and a chain of affiliates.
Meanwhile, Murdoch and Diller promoted the notion of

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Twentieth Century Fox

Marilyn Monroe sings "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953). ® ™ AND
COPYRIGHT © 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

movies and television as complementary components of
Fox's "filmed entertainment" division. Thus the studio
was no longer regarded as primarily a motion picture
operation, and indeed Fox's share of the movie market
gradually declined as its filmed entertainment revenues
increased. The studio turned out a few blockbuster hits
during Diller's regime, including Aliens (1986), Die Hard
(1988), and Home Alone (1990), but it displayed
nowhere near the blockbuster-driven mentality of its
major competitors.

In 1992 Diller left Fox, satisfied with his achieve-
ments but determined to build and run his own com-
pany. Murdoch by then was tightening his grip on Fox as
well as News Corp., which he continued to expand at a
staggering pace, building a vertically and horizontally
integrated global communications system that featured
multiple courses of "content," multiple modes of distri-

bution, and multiple "pipelines" to the consumer — with
Fox-TV being the most lucrative. The movie studio
continued to turn out a steady supply of hits after
Diller's departure, most notably Titanic (1997), which
Fox co-financed and co-released with Paramount, and
which earned over $1.8 billion in its initial worldwide
theatrical release. Fox also saw huge revenues as the
distributor of the rejuvenated Star Wars series, and in
fact by 2005, Titanic, Independence Day (1996), and the
Star Wars franchise gave Fox a share in six of the top
twenty-five worldwide box-office hits. Meanwhile, Fox
Searchlight, the studio's indie subdivision launched in
the mid-1990s (primarily as a distributor of low-budget
independent films), enjoyed a remarkable run of hits
including The Full Monty (1997), Boys Don't Cry
(1999), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Napoleon
Dynamite (2004), and Sideways (2004).

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275

Twentieth Century Fox

In the early twenty-first century, 20th Century Fox
remains one of Hollywood's principal motion picture
producer-distributors, and along with 20th Century Fox
Television is a primary "content provider" for News
Corp.'s vast media delivery holdings — the Fox-TV
broadcast network, a dozen cable channels (including
FX, the Fox Movie Channel, Fox News, et al.), and
extensive cable and satellite holdings overseas. Thus the
film and television studios, which co-exist within Fox
Filmed Entertainment, are part of a worldwide, vertically
integrated media system that has effectively reconstituted
the studio system of old on a global, diversified scale.
Movies are key to the system's success, of course,
although Fox's most successful filmed entertainment
franchises have come from the television side — hit series
like The Simpsons and The X-Files, whose capacity to
generate revenues far surpasses even the most successful
movie blockbusters. Indeed, given the "ownership" of
the contract talent and the mode of production involved,
these TV series franchises are perhaps the clearest
descendants of the star-genre formulas that made 20th
Century Fox and the other Hollywood studios tick a
half-century ago.

FURTHER READING

Block, Alex Ben. Outfoxed: Marvin Davis, Barry Diller, Rupert
Murdoch, Joan Rivers, and the Inside Story of America's Fourth
Television Network. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Finler, Joel W. The Hollywood Story. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Gomery, Douglas. "Vertical Integration, Horizontal Regulation:
The Growth of Rupert Murdoch's US Media Empire." Screen
27, nos. 3-4 (May-August 1986): 78-87.

Kiernan, Thomas. Citizen Murdoch: The Unexpurgated Story of
Rupert Murdoch — The World's Most Powerful and
Controversial Media Lord. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986.

Mair, George. The Barry Diller Story: The Life and Times of
America 's Greatest Entertainment Mogul. New York: John
Wiley, 1997.

Sinclair, Upton. Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. Los
Angeles: Author, 1933; New York: Arno Press, 1970.

Thomas, Laurie, and Barry R. Litman. "Fox Broadcasting

Company, Why Now? An Economic Study of the Rise of the
Fourth Broadcast 'Network.'" Journal of Broadcasting and
Electronic Media 35, no. 2 (1991): 139-157.

Thomas, Tony, and Aubrey Solomon. The Films of 20th Century
Fox: A Pictorial History. Revised edition. Secaucus, NJ:
Citadel Press, 1985.

Thomas Schatz

276

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

UFA (UNIVERSUM FILM
AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT)

The story of the Universum-Film AG, popularly known
as "Ufa," is inextricably bound to the history of German
cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. As
perhaps no other film company in relation to its national
film culture, Ufa's changing fortunes were a barometer of
the economic, political, aesthetic, and ideological strug-
gles that took place in Germany until the aftermath of
World War II. Although Ufa never monopolized the
German market the way Paramount-MGM-Fox con-
trolled the American industry, its power was both real,
in terms of its combined production, distribution, and
exhibition potential, and imagined, as the symbolic core
of the German film industry's aesthetic aspirations.
Founded by the German High Command in 1917, Ufa
was the object of an American takeover in a country torn
by postwar inflation, revolutions, and counterrevolu-
tions, then co-opted in 1933 and inflated to a state-
owned monopoly operated by the Nazi Party for its
own propagandistic purposes, and ultimately decon-
structed after the war by the Allies to protect American
film interests, mirroring the German experience of war
and revolution. Yet, ironically, the company tried to
create for both its own employees and its audience a
fragile, hermetic world, a Lebenswelt outside the strictures
and commands of experience that existed only in the
darkened caverns of the studio and in the minds of a
people burdened with too much history.

Siegfried Kracauer was the first to recognize Ufa's
ambiguous role in German history and cinema, stating
unequivocally that "the genesis of Ufa testifies to the
authoritarian character of Imperial Germany" (p. 37).

From this thesis he developed his reflection theory of
Germany's fall, seeing in the myriad monsters created
in Ufa's Babelsberg studios the precursors to the bureau-
crats operating the concentration camps. David Stewart
Hull, on the other hand, places Ufa at the center of the
Filmwelt, a world in a vacuum where the "overriding
concern was continuance of the artistic status quo and
to hell with politics" (p. 7). Most film historians have
taken one of these two positions: while more liberal
writers have viewed Ufa as a bogeyman of the German
right, bent on ideologically battering the German elec-
torate, conservative historians have described Ufa as an
apolitical free-trade zone catering to the desires of
German film buffs. Most recently, Klaus Kreimeier has
tried to move beyond this dichotomy, arguing that Ufa
was always a massive bundle of contradictions and func-
tioned precisely because it was able to bring under one
roof German Realpolitik and expressionistic dreams,
monopolistic studio policies and individual artistic aspi-
rations, simultaneously surrendering to ideological
imperatives while encouraging experimental daring.

Ufa was officially founded after a highly covert oper-
ation on 18 December 1917 when the banking firm of
Lindstrom AG bought all German branches of the Danish
Nordisk-Film Company for ten million reichsmarks.
Included in the deal was the largest German cinema chain,
Union-Theater AG, its distribution company, and the
Oliver-Film, Nordisk's German production studio. Also
purchased were Germany's oldest film producer, the
Messter company (and its distribution arm, Hansa-
Filmverleih), for an additional four million reichsmarks

277

UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft)

(plus 1.3 million reichsmarks in Ufa stock), and the
Projektions "Union" A.G., Germany's second largest
producer and owner of fifty-six cinemas, for 1.11 mil-
lion reichsmarks, as well as several other smaller com-
panies that owned laboratories, manufactured camera
equipment, or provided related services. Thus with
one fell swoop Ufa became Germany's first vertically
and horizontally integrated film conglomerate, control-
ling exhibition, distribution, and production, which
followed similar structural developments among the
Hollywood majors. The merger had been organized by
Emil Georg von Stauss, director of the Deutsche Bank,
who, in association with high-placed individuals in the
banking and electrical industry, had convinced the
German military High Command under General
Erich Ludendorff that such an enterprise was in the
national interest: Ufa was to produce war propaganda
and pro-German propaganda for neutral countries.
Ludendorff had sent a memo on 4 July 1917 outlining
the general strategy as well as the Prussian government's
secret 55 percent financial participation. With the
Armistice in 1918, however, the imperial government
abdicated and Ufa was left to its own devices to pro-
duce entertainment films.

GERMAN ART CINEMA

Paul Davidson, the founder of the Projektions "Union"
A.G., became the production head of Ufa, but he left
most production decisions to the subsidiary companies,
which were still largely independent, while continuing a
policy of acquisition. Thus, in 1918 Ufa purchased the
May-Film Co. (Joe May), BB-Film (Heinrich Bolten-
Baeckers), Gloria (Hanns Lippmann), and Maxim (Max
Galitzenstein) film companies. Ufa's first international
success came with the so-called "Monumentalfilme" of
Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) {Passion [Madame DuBarry,
1919]; Deception [Anna Boleyn, 1920] and Joe May
{Herrin der Welt, [Mistress of the World, 1919-20]), big
budget historical epics calculated for an international
market. However, a sea change occurred when Erich
Pommer's (1889-1966) Decla-Bioscop AG was merged
with Ufa in November 1921; simultaneously its capital
was increased from 25 to 200 million reichsmarks. Ufa
was now a major player in the German and European
market, controlling distribution in large parts of Central
and Eastern Europe, much to the chagrin of the
Americans.

Pommer, who had won an international success with
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari { The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
1920), gave his directors a large degree of freedom,
preferring to concentrate on increasing Ufa's export busi-
ness by guaranteeing a cinema of quality, which would be
saleable abroad. As a result, Ufa directors produced some

of the greatest films of the era, including Die Nibelungen
(Fritz Lang, 1923-24), Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer,
1924), Der Letzte Mann {The Last Laugh, F. W. Murnau,
1924), Variete {Jealousy, E.A. Dupont, 1925), Ein
Walzertraum {The Waltz Dream, Ludwig Berger, 1925),
and Geheimnisse einer Seele {Secrets of a Soul, G. W. Pabst,
1926). This was accomplished by hiring Germany's best
directors, expanding the Babelsberg studios outside
Berlin to become the most modern facility in Europe,
and bringing together a team of technicians, art directors,
and cameramen who were encouraged to experiment.
Among the innovators were cameramen Karl Freund
(1890-1969) and Fritz Arno Wagner (1891-1958).
The giant studio sets, innovative lighting designs, optical
tricks (Schiifftan process), and daring camera movements
in the films of Murnau, Lang, and Dupont would not
have been possible without an atmosphere Kreimeier has
described as that of a medieval "Bauhutte" (cathedral
builders' guild). Unlike American studio stars,
Germany's best known actors, including Conrad Veidt
(1893-1943), Emil Jannings (1884-1950), Werner
Krauss (1884-1959), and Brigitte Helm (1906-1996),
were never contractually bound to the company, each
working only intermittently for Ufa. Ufa also established
newsreel, documentary, educational, and advertising
departments and an experimental film laboratory, where
Viking Eggeling (1880-1925) completed his abstract
animations.

But by late 1925 Ufa was at the brink of financial
collapse due to multiple factors, including the revaluation
of the reichsmark after a period of hyperinflation, failing
to invest profits in infrastructure, high production costs
{Metropolis [1927] is later blamed), and the mounting
pressure of American companies attempting to make
inroads in the German and Central European markets.
In December 1925, Ufa announced the so-called
Parufamet contract, which gave virtual control of Ufa's
first-run theatres to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and
Paramount while also granting them 50 percent of
income from Ufa's own productions. In exchange, Ufa
received a loan for four million dollars and American
distribution of its "suitable" films in theatres in the
United States. But the Americans claimed that all but a
handful of German films were unsuitable for
distribution.

The contract was a disaster, and Ufa continued to
bleed cash. Relief of sorts came in the form of Alfred
Hugenberg, Germany's greatest newspaper czar who was
also the leader of the right-wing German National Party
(Hugenberg entered Hitler's first cabinet in 1933).
Hugenberg purchased Ufa in March 1927 and immedi-
ately instituted reforms, putting his longtime lieutenant
Ludwig Klitzsch at the head of the company. Klitzsch
renegotiated the Parufamet contract by paying off the loan

278

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft)

ERICH POMMER

b. Hildesheim, Germany, 20 July 1889, d. 8 May 1966

Erich Pommer is one of the few internationally known
German film producers, responsible for the "golden age"
of Weimar cinema as the head of production at Ufa in its
most productive period. He joined the Berlin branch of
Gaumont Production Company in 1907 and by 1919 he
was the sole owner of the Deck company, which produced
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
Robert Wiene, 1920), establishing Pommer's reputation
far beyond Germany's borders. While accounts differ as to
Pommer's role in that production — the scriptwriters even
accused Pommer of watering down the film's ideological
message — most agree that Pommer's advertising campaign
made the film a success. In April 1920 Deck merged with
its largest competitor (besides Ufa), Bioscop, giving
Pommer control over forty more theaters and the newly
constructed Babelsberg studios outside Berlin.

The success of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari convinced
Pommer to continue a policy of mixing art and commerce,
which he pursued by green-lighting films by Robert
Wiene, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang and establishing a
stable team of film technicians who would come to
dominate German cinema. When Decla-Bioscop merged
with Ufa in November 1921, Pommer became production
head, producing such classics as Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang,
1922), Die Nibelungen (Lang, 1923-24), Der Letzte Mann
{The Last Laugh, F. W. Murnau, 1924), Variete {Jealousy,
E. A. Dupont, 1925), Faust (Murnau, 1926), and
Metropolis (Lang, 1927). Yet the latter film's cost overruns
also spelled Pommer's doom, forcing him to resign in
January 1926.

Pommer went to Paramount Studios in Hollywood
and before year's end released Hotel Lmperial (Mauritz
Stiller, 1927), then Barbed Wire (Rowland V. Lee, 1927),
both melodramas situated in World War I Europe, before
being called back to Berlin. The media czar Alfred

Hugenberg now controlled Ufa and had instituted an
American-style producer-unit system to control costs.
Some directors, like Wilhelm Thiele or Robert Siodmak,
thought Pommer too controlling, but the fact remains that
over the next several years he produced some of the most
successful German silent and sound films of the late
Republic, including Asphalt (Joe May, 1929), Der Blaue
Engel {The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930), Der
Kongress Tanzt {Congress Dances, Erik Charell, 1931), and
F.P.I Antwortet Nicht {F.P.I Doesn't Answer, Karl Hard,
1932). Unlike many of his earlier art films, these were
highly profitable light entertainments, whether musicals or
science fiction dramas.

The rise of National Socialism forced Pommer into
exile and he never recovered, even though he worked in
Paris (Fox), London (Korda), and Hollywood (RKO). In
August 1946 Pommer was invited by the United States
Army to return to Germany as a film control officer to
rebuild the German film industry — a difficult task, given
government bureaucracy and German resentments against
the emigres.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari { The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
Robert Wiene, 1920), Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang, 1923-
24), Der Letzte Mann {The Last Laugh, F. W. Murnau,
1924), Variete {Jealousy, E. A. Dupont, 1925), Barbed
Wire (Rowland V. Lee, 1927), Der Kongress Tanzt
{Congress Dances, Erik Charell, 1931), Jamaica Inn (Alfred
Hitchcock, 1939), Kinder, Mutter, und ein General
{Children, Mother, and the General, Laszlo Benedek, 1955)

FURTHER READING

Hardt, Ursula. From Caligari to California: Erich Pommer's
Life in the International Film Wars. Providence, RI:
Berghahn Books, 1996.

Jan-Christopher Horak

and establishing a producer-unit system of production,
much like the one Hollywood had in place by the late
1910s. He also brought Pommer back from Hollywood to
head the company's A unit while B units for genre films were
headed by Giinther Stapenhorst (1883-1976), Alfred Zeisler
(1897-1985), and Gregor Rabinowitsch (1889-1953).

In September 1929, Ufa completed construction of its
new sound film studios in Babelsberg. Its first sound film,
Melodie des Herzens {Melody of the Heart, Hanns Schwarz)
opened on 16 December 1929, followed by Der Blaue
Engel {The Blue Angel, 1930), which made Marlene
Dietrich (1901-1992) famous around the world. Both

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

279

UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft)

Erich Pommer. THE KOBAL COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

films were shot in multiple language versions (German,
English, and French) because synchronization still pre-
sented technical difficulties. Musical comedies, like
Melodie des Herzens, Die Drei von der Tankstelle {Three
Good Friends, Wilhelm Thiele, 1930), and Der Kongress
Tanzt {Congress Dances, Erik Charell, 1931), were wildly
popular, apolitical, and staple products in the early 1930s.
Another genre that gained increasing prominence was his-
torical films that resurrected the past glories of Prussian
militarism, including Das Flotenkonzert von Sanssouci {Flute
Concert of Sans-Souci, 1930) and Morgenrot {Dawn, 1933),
the latter film opening one day after Adolf Hitler's ascen-
sion to power. Dawn depicts the "heroic" struggle of
U-boats in World War I and was the perfect fascist film
for the new era. (The hero states, "We Germans may not
know how to live, but we certainly know how to die.")

NAZI CONTROL

Just as Ufa's Dawn anticipated Nazi cinema, its board
preempted official Nazi policy: three days before the
official Nazi boycott of German Jews was instituted,
Ufa fired all of its Jewish employees (29 March 1933).
While in the course of 1933 the Propaganda Ministry
was established under Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) in
order to create a precensorship office for the ideological

control of all German film productions and the industry
was aryanized by making it illegal for Jews to make films,
Ufa and other film companies remained economically
independent. However, in 1937 the German Reich
secretly purchased 5 1 percent of Ufa through a dummy
corporation, Cautio Treuhand GmbH, and by 1939
owned 99 percent of Ufa stock. The government's own-
ership of Ufa was not publicly announced until February
1941, after which all other remaining German produc-
tion companies were dissolved and integrated into the
now wholly state-owned Ufa. This allowed the Allies to
completely dismantle Ufa after the end of World War II,
ostensibly as part of the denazification process but with
the hidden agenda of guaranteeing that German cinema
would never again threaten Hollywood hegemony.

But in 1933 Goebbels still had big plans for Ufa. His
goal was to wean Germans from American films by
creating a Hollywood-style star system on the one hand
and by producing seemingly apolitical entertainment
films on the other, which would lull the German public
into believing that there were still ideology-free zones in
the cinema. He specifically stated that he did not want to
see Nazis on the screen but rather that the best propa-
ganda was presented covertly. In order to create an
atmosphere of internationalism (allowing Germans to
forget that they could no longer travel abroad), Ufa
imported new female stars, like Zarah Leander
(1907-1981, Sweden), Marika Rokk (1913-2004,
Hungary), and Kristina Soderbaum (1912-2001, Sweden),
who appear in overheated melodramas by Detlef Sierck
(1897-1987, also known as Douglas Sirk) and Veit
Harlan (1899-1964) and musicals by Georg Jacoby
(1883-1964). Leander, in particular, became wildly popular
in such films as Zu neuen Ufern {To New Shores, 1937)
and Das Wunschkonzert {Request Concert, 1940), films
that addressed women's desire, all the while subtly insert-
ing fascist attitudes in order to prepare women for war.
For young male audiences, Ufa produced adventure films
with Hans Albers (1891-1960) that glorified combat and
war, thus preparing German youth for the coming war of
aggression without overt political tones. As the war went
from bad to worse for the Germans in 1942-43, Ufa
focused almost exclusively on entertainment films that
kept the minds of audiences off the rising death toll and
falling bombs.

Meanwhile, Ufa also produced a yearly quota of
Nazi propaganda films, usually historical epics that recon-
figured German history by using the vocabulary of Nazi
ideology and valorizing their heroes as Fuhrer-figutes in
the image of Adolf Hitler. The cycle began with Gustav
Ucicky's (1898-1961) Fluchlinge {Refugees, 1933), about
the struggle of German nationals in China and ended with
Harlan's Kolberg (1945), which portrays an episode from
the Napoleonic Wars (1813) during which a group of

280

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft)

F. W. Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) made innovative use of the moving camera, eliminating the need
for subtitles. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Prussian citizens holds off the marauding Russian Army,
thus directly paralleling the contemporary situation on the
Eastern Front. However, by the time the film was pre-
miered in Berlin, 90 percent of German cinemas had been
bombed to smithereens by the Allies.

Ufa's history ends with a whimper. In June 1953 the
"Lex Ufi" took effect, a law passed by the West German
government to reprivatize the company, which by then
consisted of little more than real estate. The giant Ufa
studios in Neubabelsberg, within the Soviet zone of
occupation, fell under the control of the Deutsche-Film
Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), the state-owned film produc-
tion company of the German Democratic Republic. In
1964, Ufa film rights to the catalogue eventually passed
into the hands of the F. W. Murnau Foundation, which
was controlled by the German Ministry of the Interior.

SEE ALSO Censorship; Germany; National Cinema;
Propaganda

FURTHER READING

Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's
Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Hull, David Stuart. Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the
German Cinema, 1933-1945. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969.

Koepenick, Lutz. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between
Hitler and Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological
History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1947.

Kreimeier, Klaus. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest
Film Company, 1918-1945. Translated by Robert Kimber
and Rita Kimber. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Rentschler, Eric. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its
Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Jan-Christopher Horak

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

281

UNITED ARTISTS

Unlike the other major motion picture companies,
United Artists (UA) never owned a studio or had actors
and directors under contract. It functioned throughout
its life solely as a distribution company for independent
producers. The history of the company can be conven-
iently divided into three periods: (1) from 1919 to 1950,
when the company was owned by Mary Pickford (1893—
1979), Charles Chaplin (1889-1977), and their partners
and functioned mainly as a boutique distributor of qual-
ity films; (2) from 1951 to 1981, when the company was
rescued from near bankruptcy by a new management
team headed by Arthur Krim (1910-1994) and Robert
Benjamin, who transformed UA into a modern business
enterprise; and (3) from 1981 to 2004, when the com-
pany was acquired by Kirk Kerkorian (b. 1917), who
merged it with MGM and sold off and reacquired parts
of both companies several times until he finally disposed
of the remains to Sony in 2004.

THE BOUTIQUE

United Artists was founded in 1919 by Mary Pickford,
Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939), and
D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) as a means of insuring
control over the marketing of their pictures.
Capitalizing on their fame in the movies, Pickford,
Chaplin, and their partners had risen from the ranks of
studio employees to become heads of their own inde-
pendent production companies. They enjoyed consider-
able autonomy over their work — from the writing of the
scenario to the final cut — and released their films
through leading companies, which provided them with
production financing and a share of the profits. But
rumors of a consolidation in the industry by companies

that intended to cap salaries placed the stars on the
defensive. By forming United Artists they would now
have to secure their own financing and oversee the selling
of their pictures, but the risks were worth taking to
guarantee their independence.

During the early years of UA's existence, the found-
ers delivered some of the finest pictures of their careers.
The premiere UA release was Douglas Fairbanks' His
Majesty, the American, which was released on 1 September
1919. Fairbanks went on to produce such swash-
bucklers as Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad
(1924). Pickford's best- remembered pictures were
Polly anna (1920), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), and a
remake of Tess of the Storm Country (1922). Griffith
delivered Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East
(1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), among others.
Chaplin came through with the influential A Woman of
Paris (1923) and his acknowledged masterpiece, The
Gold Rush (1925).

Despite this record of excellence, which earned a
reputation for the company as the Tiffany's of the indus-
try, United Artists confronted a product shortage from
the outset. The company was geared to release one pic-
ture a month — three pictures a year from each of the
owners — to operate efficiently. But production pro-
gressed slower than had been anticipated. Chaplin, for
example, decided to produce full-length features exclu-
sively, rather than continue with two- or three-reelers;
and Fairbanks began producing costume spectaculars,
which cost more and took longer to make.

To fill out the roster, UA attempted to bring in
other big-name stars as partners without success, since

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

283

United Artists

they were either tied to the major studios or had no
stomach for the risks of independent production. Not
until Joseph M. Schenck (1878-1961), producer and
entrepreneur, was brought in as a partner in 1924 to
reorganize the company did circumstances improve.
Schenck brought three stars with him under contract —
his wife, Norma Talmadge (1897-1957); his sister-in-law,
Constance Talmadge (1900-1973); and his brother-in-
law, Buster Keaton (1895-1966). To solve the product
crisis, Schenck formed Art Cinema Corporation to finance
and produce pictures for UA distribution. This company
was owned by Schenck and his business associates and was
not a UA subsidiary. Art Cinema went on to deliver over
fifty pictures to UA. Among them were three Buster
Keaton masterpieces, The General (1927), College (1927),
and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).

To streamline operations and save on overhead
expenses, Schenck proposed merging the company with
the distribution arm of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which
was then a fledgling producer-distributor connected to
the Loew's theater chain. But Chaplin vetoed the plan,
fearing that MGM would use UA's films to force what he
considered its inferior product on exhibitors, among
other reasons. To survive the battle for the theaters,
which was being waged by several companies to gain
control of the exhibition market, Schenck proposed
forming a United Artists theater chain to insure access
to first-run houses at favorable rental rates for the com-
pany's films. Chaplin vetoed this proposal as well, with
the result that in June 1926 Schenck and his UA partners
on their own formed the United Artists Theatre Circuit,
a publicly-held company, separate from United Artists,
which went on to construct or acquire first-run theaters
in the major metropolitan areas. Schenck had other plans
to strengthen United Artists, such as a proposed merger
with Warner Bros., but United Artists would remain
what it was founded to be, what Chaplin doggedly
insisted on its being, a distribution company for top-
quality independent productions.

Nonetheless, Schenck's reorganization had stabilized
the company and created a niche in which United Artists
could function effectively throughout the studio era. The
company had established distribution outlets in most
overseas markets and was firmly ensconced as one of
Hollywood's eight major motion picture companies,
albeit the smallest. Of the original founders, only
Charlie Chaplin remained active as a producer during
the 1930s. The star system was now firmly controlled by
the majors and the day of the actor-producer had passed.
Chaplin therefore was an anomaly in the business. He
not only produced his pictures using his own money, but
he also wrote, directed, and starred in them as well — a
one-man show — that included City Lights (1931),

Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1941), and
Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

UA's most active producers during the 1930s were
Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974), Twentieth Century
Pictures, Alexander Korda (1893-1956), David O.
Selznick (1902-1965), Walter Wanger (1894-1968),
and a few others. Three of these producers, Goldwyn,
Korda and Selznick, also became partners in the com-
pany. As a group, they constituted a new breed of inde-
pendent — the "creative" producer. The creative producer
operated in much the same way as the head of a major
studio, only on a much smaller scale. Sam Goldwyn, for
example, owned a small studio in Hollywood, where he
made forty pictures during the decade, all of which he
personally financed. His production staff included some
of the best talent around — art director Richard Day
(1896-1972); cinematographer Gregg Toland (1904-
1948); music director Alfred Newman (1901-1970);
directors John Ford (1894-1973), Leo McCarey
(1898-1969), King Vidor (1894-1982), and William
Wyler (1902-1981); and writers Sidney Howard
(1891-1939), Elmer Rice (1892-1967), Maxwell
Anderson (1888-1959), Lillian Hellman (1906-1984),
Ben Hecht (1894-1964), Robert E. Sherwood (1896-
1955), and S. N. Behrman (1893-1973). What linked
Goldwyn and the other producers to UA was the distri-
bution contract, a document guaranteeing that UA
would sell and promote their pictures in all the principal
markets of the world. In return for this service, UA
charged its producers a distribution fee to recoup its
marketing expenses and to generate a profit.

United Artists released relatively few pictures each
year, from fifteen to twenty. As a group, they could be
labeled prestige pictures. As understood by the trade, the
prestige picture was not a genre; rather, the term desig-
nated production values and promotion treatment. A
prestige picture was typically a big-budget special of any
genre based on a presold property and injected with
plenty of star power, glamorous and elegant trappings,
and elaborate special effects.

Sam Goldwyn produced a series of Eddie Cantor
(1892-1964) musicals starting with Whoopee! (1930),
which was shot in two-strip Technicolor and marked
Busby Berkeley's entry into the movies, and two prestige
films based on Pulitzer Prize— winning works, King
Vidor's Street Scene (1931) and John Ford's Arrowsmith
(1931). Goldwyn sustained his reputation as a producer
of class pictures by making three pictures in collaboration
with William Wyler, Dodsworth (1936), Dead End
(1937), and Wuthering Heights (1939). Wuthering
Heights, Goldwyn's last picture for UA, was one of the
most highly admired pictures of the decade, winning the
New York Film Critics award for best picture, among

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other honors. Based on Emily Bronte's strange tale of a
tortured romance, it starred Laurence Olivier as the
demon-possessed Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as his
beloved Cathy.

Twentieth Century, which was owned by Joseph
Schenck and Darryl Zanuck (1902-1979), a former
Warner Bros, producer, supplied UA with quality fare
from 1933 until it merged with Fox Films in 1935,
including Alfred Werker's The House of Rothschild
(1934) and Richard Boleslawski's Les Miserables (1935).
The British producer-director Alexander Korda (1893-
1956) became a partner in UA in 1935 after delivering
The Private life of Henry VIII (1933), an historical biopic
starring Charles Laughton, which earned Laughton an
Academy Award® for Best Actor and sparked a brief
interest in the United States in British costume pictures
and historical biopics. Korda went on to deliver such
films as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Rene Clair's The
Ghost Goes West (1935), and The Pour Feathers (1939).

In his attempt to compete with the very best in the
business, David O. Selznick (1902-1965) produced a
series of prestige picture for UA that included The
Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), A Star Is
Born (William Wellman, 1937), and Rebecca (Alfred
Hitchcock, 1940). Selznick's biggest hit, Gone With The
Wind (1939), was given to MGM in return for Clark
Gable's services and much-needed production financing.
After being made a partner in UA in 1941, Selznick
produced three hits, Since You Went Away (Cromwell,
1944), Til Be Seeing You (William Dieterle, 1944), and
Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945).

Always in search of films from any appropriate
source to fill out its roster, UA set up a production
company in 1936 for Walter Wanger, a former studio
producer turned independent like Selznick. With financ-
ing guaranteed by UA, Wanger produced three hits,
Cromwell's Algiers (1938), Ford's Stagecoach (1939),
and Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940).

In a category of his own, Walt Disney (1901-1966)
released his phenomenally successful Mickey Mouse and
Silly Symphony cartoons through the company from
1932 to 1937. Flowers and Trees (1932), The Three
little Pigs (1933), The Tortoise and the Hare (1934),
Three Orphan Kittens (1935), and The Country Cousin
(1936) won an Academy Award® for Disney each year he
was at UA.

The ranks of independent producers swelled during
World War II as a result of greater demand for enter-
tainment by the public and a drop in production by the
studios due to shortages of material and studio personnel.
And since independent production became less specula-
tive, commercial banks were willing to at least provide
partial production financing under certain conditions.

Most of the new entrants were speculators of various
stripes, but they also included the occasional star or
director who was fleeing the servitude of the studio
system. UA opened its doors to many independent pro-
ducers, some of them far below the company's previous
standards. The few pictures that perpetuated UA's repu-
tation in this period, in addition to Chaplin's Great
Dictator, were In Which We Serve (Noel Coward,
1942), Stage Door Canteen (Sol Lessor, 1943), and The
Story of G.I. Joe (Lester Cowan, 1945).

UA's best known pictures after the war were pro-
duced by old hands, the eccentric millionaire Howard
Hughes (1905-1976), who had been dabbling in pro-
duction since the 1930s, and UA founder Charles
Chaplin, who kept up his pace of producing, directing,
and starring in a film once every five to six years. In
1946, UA agreed to distribute Hughes's The Outlaw
starring Jane Russell, a picture which Hughes had briefly
released on his own in 1943 without a Production Code
seal. Hughes made the required cuts for UA, but after the
film was released he bypassed the company and launched
a vulgar advertising campaign that prominently focused
on Jane Russell's breasts. After the Production Code
Administration (PCA) revoked its approval of the movie,
Hughes brought suit against the organization charging
unlawful restraint of trade, but he lost his fight. Although
the major circuits barred the film, independent houses
were more than happy to play it, and The Outlaw went
on to gross more than any other picture UA had in
release.

Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) was controversial
for entirely separate reasons. Critical reaction by the press
to this picture, in which Chaplin abandoned his famous
tramp to play a cynical middle-class bank clerk who hap-
pened also to be a modern Bluebeard, was hostile.
Chaplin's popularity had sunk to its all-time low as a result
of a paternity suit he was involved in and rising resentment
over Chaplin's alleged pro-communist stand during the
war. He was asked if he was a communist, he was asked
why he had not become an American citizen, and he was
accused of being unpatriotic. John Rankin, a member of
the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called
for Chaplin's deportation. Following a hate campaign, led
primarily by the Catholic War Veterans and the American
Legion, and boycotts of the picture, Chaplin ordered it
withdrawn from distribution. Even though it grossed more
than $1.5 million abroad, Chaplin felt that the UA sales
force was responsible for its poor domestic showing, with
the result that he lost confidence in his company.

THE KRIM-BENJAMIN TAKEOVER

The motion picture industry entered a recession after the
war, causing financial institutions to declare a moratorium

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on independent production. Lacking capital resources
and unable to finance production, UA went downhill.
The threat of bankruptcy in 1951 convinced Mary
Pickford and Charles Chaplin, the two remaining stock-
holders in the company, to turn over operating control
of United Artists to a management team headed by two
young lawyers, Arthur B. Krim and Robert S.
Benjamin. The deal Krim and Benjamin struck was that
if United Artists turned a profit in any one of the first
three years of their management, the team would be
allowed to purchase a 50 percent stake in the company
for a nominal one dollar per share.

Taking the offensive, Krim and Benjamin gained the
confidence and support of an increasing number of banks
and initiated a broad financing program that attracted
important producers, stars, and directors to the company.
In return for distribution rights, UA now offered inde-
pendent producers financing, creative control over their
work, and a share of the profits. In essence, UA went into
partnership with its producers. The company and a pro-
ducer had to agree on the basic ingredients — story, cast,
director, and budget — but in the making of the picture,
UA gave the producer complete autonomy including the
final cut.

After a picture was placed in release, United Artists
charged its producer a schedule of distribution fees rang-
ing from 30 to 45 percent of the film's rentals, depending
on the market (that is, domestic or foreign). These fees
were designed not only to recoup the company's expenses
in maintaining a permanent worldwide sales organiza-
tion, but also to generate profits. Since the marketing
costs of a picture remained relatively fixed regardless of
its box office performance, a hit could generate revenues
well in excess of distribution expenses.

Distribution profits rewarded the company, to be
sure, but UA also used them to offset losses on produc-
tion loans and to contribute to a pool for the financing of
new projects. For those pictures that earned back their
investments, United Artists also enjoyed production prof-
its. Since the distribution fee offset UA's risk as financier,
the company could afford to be generous with the pro-
duction profits. UA gave anywhere from 50 to 75 percent
of the profits to the producer. These were the rewards for
the filmmaker's efforts.

The Krim-Benjamin team turned a profit in its first
year and within a few years bought out Chaplin and
Pickford to own the company outright by 1955. In
1957, they took the company public and its stock was
traded on the New York Stock Exchange. By then, UA's
roster included fifty independents, among them such
actor-producers as John Wayne (1907-1979), Frank
Sinatra (1915-1998), Gregory Peck (1916-2003), Bob
Hope (1903-2003), and Kirk Douglas (b. 1916); such

director-producers as William Wyler (1902-1981),
Stanley Kramer (1913-2001), and Otto Preminger
(1906—1986); and such production units as the Mirisch
Corporation and Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. No longer the
smallest of the majors, United Artists grew to become
the largest producer-distributor of motion pictures in the
world by 1966.

Two prestige pictures came to the new UA the first
year, Sam Spiegel's The African Queen (John Huston,
1951) and Stanley Kramer's High Noon (Fred
Zinnemann, 1952). In 1952, UA released Arch
Oboler's Bwana Devil, which started the 3-D craze, and
in 1953, Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue, which
ignited a campaign by UA to challenge the Production
Code. The Hecht-Lancaster production of Marty (1955),
a small-budget sleeper starring Ernest Borgnine, further
boosted the company's reputation by winning the
Oscar® for best picture. After going public, UA was off
and running. Stanley Kramer delivered The Defiant Ones
(1958) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); Kirk
Douglas, The Vikings (1958); Otto Preminger, Exodus
(1960); Burt Lancaster, The Birdman of Alcatraz
(1962); and Jerome Hellman-John Schlesinger,
Midnight Cowboy (1969). The latter was the only X- rated
film to win the Oscar® for best picture.

By far, UA's most successful alliance was with the
Mirisch Company. The brainchild of Harold Mirisch
and his two brothers, Walter and Marvin, the Mirisch
company operated as an "umbrella" organization that
provided business and legal services to independents.
The objective was to allow filmmakers to concentrate
on production while the company managed the logistics
of production, arranged the financing and distribution,
and supervised the marketing. To produce its top-of-the-
line product, Mirisch gave multiple-picture contracts to
such ranking directors as Billy Wilder, John Sturges,
Robert Wise, and George Roy Hill and to promising
younger directors such as Blake Edwards and Norman
Jewison.

The Mirisches produced nearly seventy pictures for
UA over fifteen years. They were in every genre and
consistently took Hollywood's top honors. Three pictures
won Oscars® for best picture: The Apartment (Wilder,
1960), West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961), and In the
Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). Other
acclaimed Mirisch pictures included Some Like It Hot
(Wilder, 1959), The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges,
1960), The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1963), and
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming
(Jewison, 1966).

United Artists operated internationally, like all the
majors, which entailed marketing foreign films in the
United States and investing in production overseas, in

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BILLY WILDER

b. Samuel Wilder, Sucha Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 22 June 1906, d. 27 March 2002

Internationally acclaimed as one of Hollywood's great
directors, Billy Wilder explored the dark side of postwar
America. Wilder was a consummate craftsman, and
worked in many styles and genres, among them film noir,
social problem drama, melodrama, romantic comedy, and
farce. His films challenged conventional movie taboos and
were known for their acerbic wit and cynical social satire.
Wilder's career peaked in 1960, when he won the best
director, best screenplay, and best picture Oscars® for The
Apartment to become the first person to win three
Academy Awards® in a year.

A German emigre, Wilder got his break in 1936 and was
hired as a screenwriter at Paramount, which paired him with
Charles Brackett, the former drama critic for The New Yorker.
Wilder and Brackett became the most successful writing team
of the period, responsible for such scripts as Bluebeard's Eighth
Wife (1938), Midnight (1939), and Ninotchka (1939, for
MGM). Beginning directing in 1942, Wilder went on to
make several award-winning films for Paramount, among
them: Double Indemnity (1944), an archetypical film noir;
The Lost Weekend (1945), a landmark social problem drama
about alcoholism; and Sunset Boulevard (1950) , a
quintessential melodrama about Hollywood.

Turning independent producer in 1954, Wilder
made The Seven Year Itch (1955) with Marilyn Monroe
for Twentieth Century Fox and Love in the Afternoon
(1957), a May-December romance with Gary Cooper and
Audrey Hepburn, for Allied Artists before joining the
Mirisch Corporation. Wilder catapulted the Mirisch
company into the forefront of the independent producer
ranks with Some Like Lt Hot (1959), a screwball farce
starring Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon.

Co-written by I. A. L. Diamond, who enjoyed a twenty-
five year partnership with Wilder, Some Like Lt Hot grossed
more than any other comedy up to that time, and was the
first of a long string of Mirisch entries to receive Academy
Award® honors. Wilder and Diamond delivered two more
hits, The Apartment (1960), a scathing comedy of manners
about corporate America starring Lemmon, Shirley
MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray; and Irma La Douce
(1963), a sex farce about a Parisian streetwalker that again
paired MacLaine and Lemmon. Lrma La Douce became
Wilder's biggest box office draw; afterwards, Wilder lost
touch with his audience and his next films for Mirisch —
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), The Fortune Cookie (1966), and
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) — were box-
office failures. Wilder continued to make quirky movies in
the seventies but later found it difficult to find studio
backing for his projects. He spent the remaining years of
his life receiving accolades for his achievements in the
movies.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset
Boulevard (1950), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It
Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960)

FURTHER READING

Chandler, Charlotte. Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal
Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

Crowe, Cameron. Conversations with Wilder. New York:
Knopf, 1999.

Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy
Wilder. New York: Hyperion, 1998.

Tino Balio

addition to marketing American films abroad. In its
search for commercial product, United Artists fared best
in Great Britain where it exploited the "Swinging
London" phenomenon. Its British investment paid off
big with Tony Richardson's production of Tom Jones
(1963), a movie version of Henry Fielding's ribald and
Hogarthian novel of the same name starring Albert
Finney. The film won four Academy Awards® — for best

picture, director, screenplay, and musical score — and set
a new box office record for a foreign film.

United Artists financed two additional ventures that
successfully capitalized on the British pop culture scene.
The first was the James Bond films. Based on the novels
of Ian Fleming (1908—1964), the James Bond series was
produced by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman.
Leading off with Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962),

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Billy Wilder. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Broccoli and Saltzman chose a relatively unknown actor
from Edinburgh to play James Bond — Sean Connery.
The Bond series continued with From Russia with Love
(Terence Young, 1963), Thunderball (Terence Young,
1965), and additional hits to become the most successful
series in film history. UA's second venture tapped British
music. To determine if the Beatles, a new British guitar
group from Liverpool, could generate interest in this
country, UA commissioned Walter Shenson to produce
A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) as a favor for
UA's record division, which wanted a soundtrack LP of
the Beatles to exploit in the American market. A Hard
Day's Night captured the Beatles at the height of their
first enormous wave of popularity. More than 1.5 million
copies of the soundtrack LP were sold in the first two
weeks of release and the picture went on to become a
huge success.

THE TRANSAMERICA MERGER AND BEYOND

United Artists' successful track record made it an object
of a takeover. The American film industry entered the
age of conglomerates during the sixties as motion picture

companies were either taken over by huge multifaceted
corporations, absorbed into burgeoning entertainment
conglomerates, or became conglomerates through diver-
sification. The takeover of Paramount by Gulf + Western
in 1966 marked the first such entry of a conglomerate
into the film industry. This move was followed by the
merger of United Artists with Transamerica Corporation,
a full-line financial service organization headquartered in
San Francisco in 1967. The takeover was a friendly one,
but relations between parent and subsidiary soured when
UA posted significant losses at the end of the sixties and
Transamerica attempted to foist "new management tech-
niques" on the company.

United Artists turned itself around by 1974 and
reestablished ties to the creative community. Going into
the 1970s, Woody Allen (b. 1935) delivered four pictures
to UA — Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted
to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper
(1973), and Love and Death (1975). Blake Edwards deliv-
ered a series of Pink Panther blockbusters — The Return of
the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again
(1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). And the
Saul Zaentz-Michael Douglas production team delivered
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975).
Based on the Ken Kesey's celebrated cult novel, Cuckoo's
Nest, starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, grossed
more than any previous UA release and achieved what no
other picture in forty years had done — a sweep at the
1975 Academy Awards® (Lt Happened One Night was the
first, in 1934). Nominated for nine Oscars®, Cuckoo's
Nest won the top five — best picture, best director, best
actor, best actress, and best screenplay adaptation. The
following year, the Robert Chartoff-Irwin Winkler pro-
duction of Rocky (John G. Alvidsen, 1976) won the
Oscar® for best picture, the second time in a row for a
UA picture. And in 1977, Woody Allen's Annie Hall won
the Oscar® for best picture, the third time in a row for a
UA picture and an industry record.

In January 1978, UA chairman Arthur Krim and top
executives resigned from the company. The dismantling
of what had been the industry's most stable management
team stunned the film business and climaxed years of
friction between the company and Transamerica, its con-
glomerate parent. Krim and his partners went on to form
Orion Pictures, a boutique production-distribution com-
pany that struggled for most of its life until it finally filed
for bankruptcy in 1991.

UA's new management had the misfortune of falling
into a blockbuster trap. Sometimes a picture of enormous
box office potential goes over budget immediately when
put into production. What to do? If the company pulls
the plug, the entire investment is lost and the company
suffers the wrath of the creative community for not

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The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960) won several Academy Awards® for United Artists. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED
BY PERMISSION.

permitting the filmmaker to realize the expected master-
piece. So more money is pumped in with the hope that
no more catastrophes will occur. Such was the case of
Michael Cimino's (b. 1943) Heaven's Gate. Proposed at
$7.5 million, budgeted at $ 1 1.5 million, and written off
finally at $44 million, the fiasco led to at least temporary
unemployment for almost everyone associated with the
picture and ultimately to the demise of UA itself.

UA had fallen into the blockbuster trap once before
during the Krim-Benjamin regime. The picture was The
Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965), a drama
of the life of Christ based on the best-selling Fulton
Oursler novel. Stevens was one of the most respected
directors in the industry and the picture showed every
promise of surpassing the box office performance of
biblical spectaculars of the 1950s like The Ten
Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959). The
Greatest Story, though, earned the distinction of becom-
ing the most ambitious and expensive film ever to be shot
in the United States up to that time. Originally budgeted

at a modest $7.4 million based on a twenty-three week
shooting schedule, the picture ultimately cost $21 mil-
lion and was brought in seventeen weeks behind sched-
ule. The overrun was due in part to logistical problems,
severe weather conditions on location in Nevada and
Utah, and to the pace of Stevens's direction.

Critics found just about everything offensive —
Stevens's literal and orthodox interpretations, the exces-
sive running time, the sets "by Hallmark," the music,
and particularly the cameos that employed thirty
Academy Award® winners, among them Shelley
Winters, Carroll Baker, John Wayne, and Sidney
Poitier. To counter the adverse reviews, UA planned a
slow and deliberate campaign that was designed to build
the picture's prestige. Eventually, the picture recouped
most of its investment.

Heaven's Gate met with a grimmer fate. It was
booby-trapped from the start. Within months after UA
approved Heaven's Gate, Cimino's The Deer Hunter

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(1978) opened in New York and Los Angeles to smash
business and won numerous awards, including five
Oscars® for best picture, director, supporting actor, edit-
ing, and sound. Cimino began shooting Heaven's Gate
immediately after the Academy Awards® ceremony. Two
weeks into production, Cimino fell two weeks behind
schedule. Sixteen weeks into production, costs had esca-
lated to $21 million. Four weeks later, Cimino held a
champagne party to celebrate the shooting of the mil-
lionth foot of film. Although UA took the drastic step of
assuming fiscal control of the picture, the action came
too late. A UA executive admitted that the studio seemed
to have lost control of the film early on. Film critics were
unanimous in their appraisal of the movie, calling Heaven's
Gate an unqualified disaster. In its first theatrical run, the
$44 million (including promotion costs) superbomb
grossed at the box office exactly $12,032.61.

Transamerica had always enjoyed basking in UA's
limelight; now it had to endure the humiliation of being
associated with one of the most public motion picture

failures of all time. Transamerica, therefore, was receptive
to a preemptive offer from Kirk Kerkorian, the Las Vegas
developer and new owner of MGM, to take UA off
its hands. Transamerica got out of the motion picture
business with a nice profit. The conglomerate paid
$185 million for UA in 1967; Kerkorian offered and
Transamerica accepted $320 million for the company in
1981. In acquiring UA, Kerkorian merged the company
into a new corporate entity, MGM/UA Entertainment
Company. Afterward, Kerkorian sold and bought all or
parts of MGM at least four times. The final sale, for $4.8
billion, was to Sony in 2004, after which MGM and
United Artists ceased to function as autonomous produc-
tion entities.

SEE ALSO Academy Awards® ; Distribution; Independent
Film; Producer; Studio System

FURTHER READING

Balio, Tino. United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.

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. United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film

Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Bach, Steven. Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of
Heaven's Gate. New York: Morrow, 1985.

Bart, Peter. Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days ofMGM. New
York: Morrow, 1990.

Bergan, Ronald. The United Artists Story: The Complete History of
the Studio and its 1581 Films. New York: Crown, 1986.

Bernstein, Matthew. Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

de Usabel, Gaizka S. The High Noon of American Films in Latin
America. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982.

Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution
of a Star Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989.

Walker, Alexander. Hollywood UK: The British Film Industry in
the Sixties. New York: Stein and Day, 1974.

Tino Balio

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UNIVERSAL

The history of Universal has been remarkably varied and
complex. From the 1915 inauguration of its colossal
facility in Hollywood, Universal was a model studio in
terms of centralized mass production and efficient mar-
keting. But its failure to develop an exhibition operation
relegated Universal to "major minor" status during the
classical era (i.e., from early 1920s through the 1940s),
while the Big Five integrated majors ruled the industry.
Thus Universal had the financial leverage and resources
to develop only a few signature stars and product lines,
although these did include such trademark cycles as the
Deanna Durbin (b. 1921) musicals of the 1930s, the
Abbott & Costello comedies of the 1940s, the Douglas
Sirk (1897-1987)-directed melodramas of the 1950s,
and, of course, the horror cycle that was the key marker
of Universal's house style throughout the classical era.

After decades of relative stability as a second-class
studio, Universal's postwar fortunes changed dramatically,
due largely to the succession of owners and partners over the
past half-century, successively International Pictures, Decca
Records, the Music Corporation of America (MCA),
Matsushita Electric, Vivendi, and General Electric. The
most important and prolonged of these alliances involved
MCA, which owned Universal from 1962 to 1990 and
created a template of sorts for the media conglomerates that
would come to rule and effectively define the New
Hollywood. The keys to MCA-Universal's success were
Lew Wasserman's (1913-2002) visionary leadership, the
integration of its film and television operations, and the
development of the modern movie blockbuster. But a sore
spot for MCA-Universal, as it had been for the studio
during the classical era, was the lack of a direct "pipeline"

to consumers in the form of a theater chain, a broadcast or
cable network, or some other delivery system.

Wasserman's decision in 1990 to sell the company to
Matsushita, the Japanese electronics giant and the home-
video pioneer, was intended to correct this shortcoming.
That effort failed, leading to a period of sustained tur-
moil and a succession of four owners over a fifteen-year
span. The most recent is General Electric, parent com-
pany of NBC, which bought the studio in 2004 and
created "NBC Universal," which may mark a return to
stability and industry might — albeit as a subsidiary of a
global conglomerate with no real connections to the
studio created almost a century ago.

THE CLASSICAL ERA

Universal was founded in 1912, when Carl Laemmle
(1867-1939) and several other independent film pio-
neers pooled their interests to create the Universal Film
Manufacturing Co. Within weeks, the new company was
under the command of Laemmle, who controlled the
studio for the next quarter-century. Laemmle got his start
in the film business in Chicago in 1905 with a string of
nickelodeon theaters, and he soon created a distribution
"exchange" to ensure a steady flow of product. He ran
afoul of the Motion Picture Patents Co., initiating a feud
with Thomas Edison and his associates that intensified
when he moved his company to New York, and, in
1909, launched a production operation, the Independent
Motion Picture Co. (IMP). By 1912, when Laemmle
merged IMP with several other firms to create
Universal, the MPPC's power was waning and the
demand for film product was surging. The movie business

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JAMES WHALE

b. Dudley, Worcestershire, England, 22 July 1889, d. 29 May 1957

During a decade-long career in Hollywood, James Whale
directed (and occasionally produced) some twenty films,
most of them for Universal Pictures. He attained
legendary stature for four of them: Frankenstein (1931),
The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933),
and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The first of these,
coming several months after Universal's breakthrough
horror hit, Dracula (1931), solidified the genre as the
cornerstone of Universal's "house style" in the 1930s and
affirmed Whale as the studio's foremost staff director. The
last of the four stands as a consummate achievement not
only of classical horror but of classical Hollywood in
general.

Whale started as a newspaper cartoonist in England
before joining the service during World War I, and began
acting in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He continued
his stage career after the war, moving into set design and
eventually directing. A hit play brought him to the United
States in the late 1920s, and the talkie revolution brought
him to Hollywood. Whale signed with Universal in 1931
to direct an adaptation of the stage play Waterloo Bridge,
and he followed that project with Frankenstein. Whale
himself cast the lead roles, selecting Colin Clive to play
Dr. Frankenstein and a little-used Universal contract
player, Boris Karloff, for the monster. The casting of
Karlofif was truly inspired, as the lanky, low-key British
actor brought both menace and pathos to the role, thus
creating a screen icon and a crucial genre convention — the
monster as both sympathetic outcast and as rampaging
beast. Karloff became one of Universal's contract stars and,
along with Bela Lugosi, defined the studio's trademark
genre.

Whale followed Frankenstein with a second-rate
melodrama, Impatient Maiden (1932), establishing a
pattern (begun with Waterloo Bridge) of alternating horror
films and women's pictures. Then came another polished

Karloff vehicle, The Old Dark House, an oddly effective
melding of the haunted house formula with a comedy of
manners that marked Whale's first effort to interject
offbeat black humor into the horror genre. That effort
continued in The Invisible Man, as the disembodied
protagonist (voiced by Claude Rains) displays a self-
deprecating wit and creates a succession of comic incidents
before the effects of his experiments render him a
murderous psychopath. Bride of Frankenstein, the
culmination of Whale's style, expertly balances horrific
drama and high kitsch, careening in its memorable finale
into screwball romance as Karloff s genial monster is
spurned by the doctor's newest creation, Elsa Lanchaster of
the electric-shock hairdo.

Whale's next major assignment was a lavish, all-star
remake of Show Boat, a solid critical and commercial
success on its release in 1936. Nevertheless, the picture's
production delays and budget overruns cost the Laemmles
their studio. Although he directed another nine films
before retiring in 1941 to concentrate on his painting,
after Showboat, Whale's career as a successful, innovative
filmmaker was at an end. Whale made an unsuccessful
comeback attempt in the late 1940s and died, aptly
enough, "under mysterious circumstances" (a drowning
victim in his swimming pool) in 1957.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The

Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Show
Boat (1936), Gods and Monsters (1998)

FURTHER READING

Curtis, James. James Whale. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
1982.

. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters.

London: Faber & Faber, 1998.

Thomas Schatz

was expanding and maturing rapidly, and Laemmle was
determined to service that industry by developing
Universal into the movie-industry equivalent of the
Ford Motor Company. In early 1914, he purchased the
230-acre Taylor Ranch, some five miles north of

Hollywood, and began construction on Universal City,
by far the largest and most advanced filmmaking facility
at that time. Inaugurated in March 1915, Universal City
was a testament to a factory-based, assembly-line mode of
production, with an annual output of some 250 features,

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James Whale. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

shorts, serials, and newsreels that could be combined into
a predictable, highly standardized "program" of pictures.

This left Universal increasingly out of step with the
other major producers, who were rapidly moving to star-
driven, feature-length films geared to the growing num-
ber of downtown theaters that catered to more "urbane,"
middle-class moviegoers. Despite the changing market-
place, Laemmle remained adamantly opposed to devel-
oping a theater chain — an enormously expensive
enterprise — and to upgrading his output and paying
top dollar for personnel. Thus, while a remarkable range
of filmmaking talent started at Universal, including stars
like Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926), Lon Chaney
(1883-1930), and Mae Murray (1889-1965), and direc-
tors like John Ford (1894-1973), Erich von Stroheim
(1885-1957), Rex Ingram (1892-1950), and Tod
Browning (1882-1962), they eventually left in pursuit
of higher salaries, bigger budgets, and greater creative
control.

Another significant expatriate was Irving Thalberg
(1899—1936), who began his career as Laemmle's secre-
tary in New York City in 1919, just out of high school,
and within three years was overseeing production at

Universal City. Thalberg convinced Laemmle to produce
a few of Hollywood's biggest "prestige pictures," notably
Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922) and two spectacular
Chaney vehicles, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). But ongoing
differences with Laemmle's conservative market strategy
led to Thalberg's departure for Louis B. Mayer's inde-
pendent production company, which in 1924 merged
with Metro and Goldwyn to create MGM.

Universal was among the last of the studios to pro-
duce talkies because of Laemmle's commitment to pro-
gram pictures for the subsequent-run (small town and
rural) markets, which were the last theaters to convert to
sound. Universal's eventual conversion coincided with
the rise of Carl Laemmle, Jr. (1908-1979), who took
command of the studio in April 1928, on his twenty-first
birthday. Thereafter, "Junior" Laemmle supervised
Universal's sound conversion and engineered its return
to prestige-level pictures with adaptations of the stage hits
Broadway and Show Boat in 1929, a lavish color musical
revue, King of Jazz (1930), and a stunning adaptation of
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis
Milestone (1895-1980). Laemmle's plans to upgrade
Universal's output were dashed when the Depression
hit, and in fact he closed down production for several
months in early 1931 to revamp operations and revert to
an even more efficient, low-budget production strategy.

One key consequence of those cutbacks was
Universal's move to horror, which became its trademark
genre in the 1930s. This was a logical move for two basic
reasons. First, Universal (like Paramount) had an excellent
international distribution system, particularly in Europe,
where it had been drawing on talent for several years —
especially from Germany, whose recruits included Paul
Fejos (1884-1960) and PaulLeni (1885-1929), early insti-
gators of Universal's horror trend with The Cat and the
Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), as well as
Karl Freund (1890-1969), William Wyler (1902-1981),
Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), and dozens of others. Second,
the horror film was a remarkably cost-efficient genre to
develop and maintain. Its design relied on darkness and
mood rather than elaborate sets, and it was far less star-
driven than other genres, although Universal did have the
good fortune to cast two unknown actors in its break-
through horror films — Bela Lugosi (1882—1956) in
Dracula and Boris Karloff (1887—1969) in Frankenstein
(both 1931) — who would become forever wedded to
Universal's house genre, as would director James Whale
(1889-1957) and cinematographer Karl Freund. Dracula
and Frankenstein began a trend that coalesced rapidly with
Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Old Dark House, and The
Mummy (all 1932). Other studios followed suit, but none
really challenged Universal's veritable monopoly on the
horror film market during the 1930s.

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Universal turned out a number of successful women's
pictures as well, notably Back Street (1932), Imitation of Life
(1934), and Magnificent Obsession (1935), which also con-
tributed to its Depression-era house style. Far more impor-
tant, though, was its ongoing commitment to subfeatures,
ranging from Jungle Jim and Radio Patrol serials (generally
twelve to fifteen weekly installments running two reels or
twenty minutes each), to its seemingly endless output of
B-western programmers starring Hoot Gibson (1892—
1962), Tom Mix (1880-1940), Johnny Mack Brown
(1904-1974), Buck Jones (1889-1942), and singing cow-
boy Ken Maynard (1895-1973). This irked "Junior"
Laemmle, who again tried to raise the studio's sights as
the Depression eased — this time with disastrous results.
Several expensive prestige pictures, notably Magnificent
Obsession (1935), Sutter's Gold (1936), and particularly a
remake of Show Boat (1936), ran severely over budget,
forcing the Laemmles to borrow heavily. When they failed
to meet their obligations in early 1936, J. Cheever Cowdin
of the Standard Capital Corporation of New York
exercised his option to buy Universal Pictures. The
Laemmles were forced out, replaced by Robert H.
Cochrane (1879-1973) as company president and Charles
Rogers (1892-1957) as studio head. By then, Show Boat,
directed by James Whale and starring Irene Dunne (1898—
1990), had been released to widespread critical and popular
acclaim, becoming one of the biggest hits in studio history.

Universal had several other hits in 1936, the most
important by far being Three Smart Girls, a modest
musical marking the debut of fourteen-year-old soprano
Deanna Durbin, which was produced by Boris Pasternak
(1890-1960) and directed by Henry Koster (1905-
1988), two German recruits who put the "teenage diva"
through her paces in a run of hits including One Hundred
Men and a Girl (1937), Mad About Music (1938), That
Certain Age (1938), Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939),
and Spring Parade (1940). The Durbin films gave
Universal another vital star-genre formula, adding a sig-
nificant dimension to its house style and a veritable
insurance policy at the box office. Durbin's hits also
enabled Universal to take on A-class projects with outside
talent, notably Destry Rides Again (1939), costarring
Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart, and several films
starring W. C. Fields (1880-1946), including You Can't
Cheat an Honest Man (1939), The Bank Dick, and My
Little Chickadee (both 1940).

Universale late Depression recovery was orchestrated
by Nate J. Blumberg and Cliff Work (1891-1963), who
replaced Cochrane and Rogers in 1937. The studio actually
showed year-end profits in 1939 for the first time in a full
decade. The recovery continued into the 1940s, although
Universal failed to realize the kind of boom enjoyed by the
majors due to its lack of a theater chain and its relative
dearth of A-class talent to exploit the overheated first-run

market. The studio did sign deals during the war with a
number of top independents producers, including Gregory
LaCava (1892-1952), Jack Skirball (1896-1985), Frank
Lloyd (1886-1960), and Walter Wanger (1894-1968).
The most important of these was Wanger, who entered a
long-term relationship after the release of Eagle Squadron in
1942, and went on to produce both in-house projects like
Arabian Nights (1942), Universal's first Technicolor
release, and Scarlet Street (1945) by way of Diana
Productions, Wanger's partnership with the film's star
(and his wife), Joan Bennett (1910-1990), and its director,
Fritz Lang (1890-1976).

While relying on independent producers for much
of its A-class product during the war, Universal contin-
ued to crank out low-cost programmers, including B
westerns with Tex Ritter (1905-1974) and Rod
Cameron (1910-1983), the Sherlock Holmes series with
Basil Rathbone (1892-1967) (picked up from Fox), and
low-budget horror films like The Invisible Man Returns
(1940), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), and The Wolf
Man (1941), launching a new cycle starring Lon Chaney,
Jr. (1906-1973). Durbin's star faded badly in the early
1940s, but her decline was offset by the sudden stardom
of Abbott & Costello. Concurrent with Paramount's
Hope-Crosby hits, Abbott & Costello utterly dominated
the box office charts during the war, initially with "serv-
ice comedies" like Buck Privates and In the Navy (both
1941), and later with genre parodies, including a Hope-
Crosby spoof, Pardon My Sarong (1942).

UNIVERSAL-INTERNATIONAL AND
THE EARLY MCA YEARS

Universal's revenues and profits reached record levels
during the war and then peaked in 1946, a year in which
the studio underwent a profound change. In an effort to
upgrade its films and compete more directly with the
major studios, Universal merged with International
Pictures, an independent company run by Leo Spitz and
William Goetz (1903—1969) that specialized in prestige
productions. Engineered by Cowdin, Blumberg, and
British producer J. Arthur Rank (1888-1972), the merger
installed Spitz and Goetz as heads of production, phased
out B-movies and subfeatures, and reduced studio output
from its wartime average of fifty per year (twice the
majors' output) to thirty-five. Existing deals with
Wanger, Mark Hellinger (1903-1947), and other inde-
pendent producers were extended, while new pacts were
signed with several others. Universal also entered a com-
plex international distribution agreement with Rank and
his British counterpart, Alexander Korda (1893-1956).

Universal-International (U-I) enjoyed critical success
in the immediate postwar era, with Hellinger turning out
three successive hits — The Killers (1946), Brute Force

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Elsa Lanchester (left) and Boris Karloff in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED
BY PERMISSION.

(1947), and The Naked City (1948) — that were among
the strongest crime films of the era. Laurence Olivier
(1907-1989) directed and starred in an adaptation of
Hamlet (1948) that gave the studio its first top Oscars®
in years. But critical success did not translate into box-
office revenues: record profits of $4.6 million in 1946
became net losses of $3.2 million in 1948. So it was back
to basics at Universal City, with the studio reverting to
high-volume, low-cost formula films for the subsequent-
run market, best characterized by three hit series: the
Abbott & Costello Meet . . . cycle launched in 1948 with
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); the Ma and
Pa Kettle series launched in 1949, and the Francis the
Talking Mule series in 1950. All three were targeted at
small town and rural audiences, and all three series
flourished throughout the 1950s. While the low-grade
series kept the studio machinery running and the reve-
nues flowing, Bill Goetz managed to keep A-class feature

production alive through a truly extraordinary deal with
talent agent Lew Wasserman, head of MCA (Music
Corporation of America), for the services of James
Stewart (1908-1997) in Winchester 73 (1950). The deal
gave Stewart 50 percent of the net revenues of the film,
making him an equal partner with U-I and forever
changing the nature and scope of profit-participation
deals in Hollywood. The success of Winchester 73 led
to similar deals with Stewart on films like Bend of the
River (1952), Thunder Bay (1953), and The Glenn Miller
Story (1953), and with several other top stars like Alan
Ladd (1913-1964) {Saskatchewan, 1954) and Kirk
Douglas (b. 1916) {Man Without a Star, 1955) as well.

Goetz negotiated the first of these deals, but his role
at U-I rapidly diminished in the early 1950s due to
another change in ownership. In late 1951, the music
giant Decca Records, which had been looking for an
entree into the movie business, began buying up

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Universal

ABBOTT and COSTELLO

William A. (Bud) Abbott, b. Asbury Park, New Jersey, 2 October 1895, d. 24 April 1974
Louis Francis (Lou) Costello, b. Patterson, New Jersey, 6 March 1906, d. 3 March 1959

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were Universal's top stars of
the 1940s, eclipsed only by Paramount's comedy duo of
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and they continued to costar
in Universal comedies until the mid-1950s. The duo
proved eminently adaptable, shifting from service
comedies (comedies about life in the military) to genre
parodies to comedy-horror hybrids, although the essence
of their onscreen appeal remained the comic banter and
classic shtick (like their "Who's on First?" routine) first
developed on the vaudeville stage years earlier.

Indeed, the lanky, snide Abbott and dumpy, bumbling
Costello were comedy veterans when they made their
unlikely breakthrough as movie stars. They refined their
comic skills on the burlesque circuit in the early 1930s,
eventually taking their routines to radio and to Broadway.
They signed with Universal for a second-rate (even by
Universal standards) 1 940 romp, One Night in the Tropics
(1940), and then were featured in a military farce, Buck
Privates (1941), as a pair of inept army draftees who
comically survive basic training and become unlikely heroes.
The plot was a pastiche of army jokes and vaudeville
routines, interspersed with tunes performed by the Andrews
Sisters — including the Oscar®-nominated "Boogie Woogie
Bugle Boy," which became a wartime standard.

Buck Privates was a huge and unexpected hit, which
Universal immediately followed with two more 1941
service comedies, In the Navy and Keep 'Em Flying. These
were created at breakneck speed by Universal's Abbott and
Costello unit, whose key contributors were the producer
Alex Gottlieb, the director Arthur Lubin, the writer John
Grant, and the cinematographer Joe Valentine. By the
time the United States entered the war in December 1941,
Abbott and Costello had become the industry's top box-
office attraction. At that point Universal shifted the focus

(out of respect for the "war effort") from service comedies
to genre parodies, including Pardon My Sarong (1942), a
spoof of the Hope-Crosby "Road" pictures. The duo
remained atop the box-office charts throughout the war,
along with Hope and Crosby and Betty Grable, but their
appeal waned in the immediate postwar period amid
repeated announcements of their impending split. They
were soon written off as an offbeat wartime phenomenon.

As their stars faded, Universal writer Grant and the
producer Robert Arthur devised a genre recombination
strategy to meld the Abbott and Costello formula with the
horror "reunion" pictures of the war years like
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). The result was
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which revived
not only the duo's careers but also two fading studio
formulas. That unlikely hit was followed by a succession of
low-cost comedy-horror hybrids, from Abbott & Costello
Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949) to Abbott & Costello
Meet the Mummy (1955). The pair finally split in 1957,
two years before Lou Costello's death.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

One Night in the Tropics (1940), Buck Privates (1941), Pardon
My Sarong (1942), Lost in a Harem (1944), The Time of
Their Lives (1946), Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein
(1948), Abbott & Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950),
Abbott & Costello Go to Mars (1953)

FURTHER READING

Furmanek, Bob, and Ron Palumbo. Abbott and Costello in
Hollywood. New York: Perigree Books, 1991.

Maltin, Leonard. Movie Comedy Teams. New York: New
American Library, revised ed. 1985.

Miller, Jeffrey S. The Horror Spoofs of Abbott and Costello.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Thor,

Schatz

Universal stock, starting with the holdings of Spitz,
Goetz, and Rank. By 1953, Decca had controlling inter-
est and Spitz and Goetz were out altogether, replaced by
the Decca president, Milton J. Rackmil, who served as
president and CEO of U-I as well. Rackmil operated out

of New York City and continued to focus primarily on
Decca, while Nate Blumberg ran the studio and Ed
Muhl, the long-time plant manager, oversaw production,
with the day-to-day filmmaking handled by a handful of
contract producers. In fact, Universal was one of the last

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Universal

Bud Abbott (left) and Lou Costello find themselves in the Foreign Legion (1950). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

studios to maintain a producer-unit system, with over
half of its output from 1952 to 1958 being handled by
only five producers, each of whom specialized in a par-
ticular type of film.

Robert Arthur (1909-1986) handled low-budget
comedies and series films, including the Abbott &
Costello, Ma and Pa Ketde, and Francis series. Aaron
Rosenberg (1912-1979) handled high-end drama, partic-
ularly Technicolor adventure films shot on location
(including the Stewart films). Ross Hunter (1920-1996)
produced Universal's "women's pictures" — mainly light
romance and glossy melodrama. The latter included direc-
tor Douglas Sirk's baroque weepies All I Desire (1953),
Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows
(1955), and Imitation of Life (1959), which confounded
critics but did excellent business. William Alland (1916—
1997) specialized in B-grade westerns and science-fiction
films, often in collaboration with director Jack Arnold

(1916-1992): It Came fiom Outer Space (1953); Creature
from the Black Lagoon (1954); This Island Earth (1955).
Albert Zugsmith (1910-1993) was the most adventurous
and eclectic of the lot, producing such wide-ranging films
as the sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957),
Orson Welles's (1915-1985) film noir masterwork Touch
of Evil (1958), and two of Sirk's most distinctive films,
Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels
(1958).

The films produced by Arthur, Rosenberg, Hunter,
Alland, and Zugsmith defined Universal's house style
until the late 1950s, when changes that had been trans-
forming Hollywood finally caught up with the studio.
The decade had been generally successful for both Decca
and Universal, although the two companies never real-
ized the kind of "synergies" that Rackmil and others
anticipated. Universal had been operating in something
of a time warp, maintaining a factory-oriented system

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Universal

and seemingly oblivious to television, independent
production, and the burgeoning blockbuster mentality.
Then in 1958, after eight years of steady but modest
profits, UTs revenues dropped severely. Rackmil, realiz-
ing that the studio was woefully out of step with the
changing industry, shut down production and began
looking for a buyer, eventually striking a deal with
MCA for the sale of the Universal City lot (for $11.25
million) while retaining control of Universal Pictures.
Rackmil stayed on as nominal president of Universal
after the sale in early 1959, but there was no question
that the chief executive of the newly merged company
was MCA's Lew Wasserman, who by then was arguably
the most powerful individual in Hollywood — a proto-
type, in fact, for a new media mogul, just as MCA
augured a new breed of entertainment company.

The phenomenal postwar rise of MCA as a force in
Hollywood was propelled by its utter domination of three
interrelated aspects of the movie and television industries:
talent representation, telefilm series production, and TV
syndication. MCA brokered more top talent, produced
more prime time series, and leased more film and tele-
vision titles from its library than any other company in the
entertainment industry. By 1958, MCA's television sub-
sidiary, Revue Productions, had outgrown its production
facility, the former Republic Studio lot, and the purchase
of the massive Universal City lot was a logical move at this
stage of its development. Wasserman had his eye on the
movie industry, however, so the purchase of the lot was
simply step one in the acquisition of Universal Pictures
itself. Step two was to facilitate the studio's recovery
through releases laden with MCA talent: Doris Day and
Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, for instance, and Cary Grant
and Tony Curtis in Operation Petticoat (both 1959).
Those two hits helped carry Universal to record profits
of $4.7 million in 1959, and the trend continued with
Spartacus (1960), a picture that Universal fully financed
and coproduced with Bryna Productions, an independent
company set up by MCA for Kirk Douglas, who produced
and starred in the historical epic. Spartacus was the most
expensive film in Universal's history, marking its first foray
into the heady realm of blockbuster productions; it was
also the biggest box office hit of 1960.

By then, Wasserman had decided to acquire
Universal by buying its parent company, Decca, but the
acquisition was complicated by legal and regulatory
issues. MCA was already contending with antitrust and
conflict of interest challenges by the Justice Department
and the FCC, and these intensified when the agency
sought to acquire Universal. Thus Wasserman opted
not only to sell off the talent agency but to dissolve it
altogether when MCA bought Decca and Universal in
1962, creating an integrated film, television, and music

company — a veritable paradigm for the modern media
conglomerate.

THE MCA-UNIVERSAL ERA

Within days of the merger, Wasserman began construc-
tion on MCA World Headquarters, a.k.a. the Black
Tower, a formidable sixteen-story, black glass monolith
that soon came to symbolize MCA-Universal's awesome
power in Hollywood. Wasserman also reinstituted the
Universal Studio Tour, which dated back to the silent
era, and whose success eventually would spawn the stu-
dio's colossal theme park operation. That was years away,
however, as was MCA-Universal's domination of the
movie business. What carried the company through the
1960s, which were troubled times for Hollywood at large
as well as for Universal Pictures, was the same dual
strategy of TV series production and syndication that
had been the basis for MCA's rise in the 1950s.
Universal Television cranked out one hit series after
another in the 1960s, including, ironically enough,
movie-length TV shows — both "long-form" (90-minute)
TV series like The Virginian (1962-1971) and The Name
of the Game (1968-1971), as well as made-for-TV mov-
ies, a format that Universal pioneered and steadily refined
for NBC. By the early 1970s Universal boasted twice the
television output of its closest competitors, Paramount
and Warner, and had the world's leading TV syndication
operation. Besides top series like Marcus Welby M.D.
(1969-1976) and Kojak (1973-1978), Universal success-
fully melded the series and TV movie formats in the
"NBC Mystery Movie" (1971-1977) amalgam of
Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife. The impor-
tance of Universal's TV division was underscored in
1973 when MCA's founder, Jules Stein, retired, moving
Wasserman up to the position of chairman-CEO, and
the MCA presidency was filled by Universal Television
head Sidney Sheinberg (b. 1935).

Wasserman and Sheinberg ruled the MCA-Universal
empire for the next two decades, thus becoming the most
enduring and stable management team in Hollywood.
Their longevity was aided immensely by a succession of
hits that took Universal Pictures — traditionally dead last
among the movie studios in terms of revenues and mar-
ket share — to the very top of the industry by the early
1980s. The surge began in 1973 with two major hits,
American Graffiti and The Sting, continued in 1974 with
two hit disaster spectacles, Earthquake and Airport '75,
and then went into high gear with the June 1975 release
of Jaws, an industry watershed. Besides putting whiz kid
Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) on the industry map (it was
his second feature), Jaws provided a prototype for the
modern Hollywood blockbuster: a high-cost, high-speed,
high-concept entertainment machine propelled by a

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nationwide, "saturation" release campaign, which was
subsequently milked for every licensing and tie-in dollar
possible, including sequels and theme-park rides. Jaws
was the first "summer blockbuster" and the first film to
return over $100 million in rental receipts to its distrib-
utor — still the measure of a blockbuster hit. Universal
kept the momentum going after Jaws with Smokey and
the Bandit (1977), Animal House, Jaws 2, and The Deer
Hunter (all 1978), The Jerk (1979), The Blues Brothers
(1980), and then in 1982 released another Spielberg-
directed megahit, B. T. , which, like Jaws — and like
Jurassic Park in 1993 — would break the existing box-
office records, becoming the biggest all-time box office
hit at the time of its release.

These blockbusters defined the New Hollywood and
signaled a certain consistency in terms of product, but
Universal was actually anything but consistent in terms of
corporate structure, market strategy, and production
operations during the 1980s and 1990s. When Jaws was
released, Universal was still a factory-oriented studio
relying on a dual output of film and television, and no
company in Hollywood was better equipped to rule the

industry in terms of sheer volume and efficiency. In
1975, employment at the studio surpassed 6,000 (an
all-time record), and all thirty- four of its sound stages
were active, with an average of twenty separate television
and feature film units in production on any given day.
Universal sustained that impetus into the early 1980s as
it climbed to the top spot in the industry in terms of
market share, revenues, and profits — an unthinkable
prospect during the classical and postwar eras.

But MCA-Universal steadily declined during the
1980s for a number of reasons. Universal squandered its
massive industry lead in television production by shifting
its focus to feature films, and, like the rest of the industry,
to the development of blockbuster hits and franchises.
Universal also relied increasingly on talent agencies — par-
ticularly Mike Ovitz's Creative Artists Agency (CAA) — to
package its most ambitious pictures, which included a few
big hits like Out of Africa (1985) but also costly flops like
Howard the Duck (1986). Meanwhile, MCA struggled to
keep pace with its major competitors, which were rapidly
expanding and diversifying, thanks in most cases to a major
merger-and-acquisition wave that began with News

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Universal

Corp-Fox in 1985 and swelled significantly in 1989 with
the Time- Warner and Sony-Columbia mergers.

At that point, Wasserman decided to find a deep-
pocketed buyer to keep MCA-Universal competitive in
the global entertainment marketplace. In 1990 he sold
the studio for $6.6 billion to the Japanese industrial giant
Matsushita, whose VHS home-video system had van-
quished Sony's Betamax, and which, like Sony, was look-
ing to Hollywood for a "hardware-software" alliance.
The Matsushita deal actually left MCA-Universal intact
with Wasserman and Sheinberg still in control, but the
union proved disastrous almost from the start because of
the collapse of the Japanese economy and severe conflicts
between the Japanese owners and the Hollywood-based
management. Despite a run of hits in the early 1990s,
including Spielberg's back-to-back 1993 hits, Jurassic
Park and Schindler's List, Matsushita sold the studio to
the Canadian distillery Seagram in 1995. In the wake of
that deal, Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. dissolved
MCA, sold off most of Universal's TV and cable assets,
and shifted its focus to the music industry. While the
latter effort was generally successful, Universal continued
to flounder as a film studio, and so in 2000 Bronfman
sold out to the French water and power giant Vivendi.
This union was another unmitigated disaster, leading to
the purchase in 2004 of Vivendi-Universal by General
Electric, the parent company of NBC, and the subse-
quent creation of "NBC Universal." (GE paid roughly
$14 billion for an 80-percent interest in Vivendi-
Universal's US film and television interests.)

Universal's acquisition by GE and its alliance with
NBC might recall the film-and-television colossus cre-
ated by Wasserman nearly a half-century earlier, but in

actuality, the studio and the industry at large have little in
common with their postwar antecedents. Rather than
creating a media powerhouse, GE's creation of NBC
Universal simply gives the studio a fighting chance
against the other media conglomerates that now compete
in the global entertainment marketplace. And like
Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and the other sur-
viving movie studios, Universal is simply one division of
a diversified multinational corporation, one component
of a vast entertainment machine.

FURTHER READING

Bruck, Connie. When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew

Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence.

New York: Random House, 2003.
Dick, Bernard. City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of

Universal Pictures. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky

Press, 1997.

Drinkwater, John. The Life and Adventures of Carl Laemmle.

New York: Putnam, 1931.
Edmunds, I. G. Big U: Universal in the Silent Days. New York:

Barnes, 1977.

Hirschhorn, Clive. The Universal Story. New York: Crown, 1983.
McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1997.
McDougal, Dennis. The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and

the Hidden History of Hollywood. New York: Crown, 1998.

Perry, Jeb H. Universal Television: The Studio and Its Programs,
1950-1980. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1983.

Thomas Schatz

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VIDEO

Although video and film are two very different mediums
of representation, they overlap in significant ways, and
their relationship continues to evolve on many levels.
Both technologies combine images and sounds that are
projected on screens to be viewed; both are time-based
media; both have the capacity to reproduce reality accu-
rately; and both are equally capable of distorting and
manipulating reality. The literal and technical similarities
might end there, but video and film are increasingly
enmeshed and their differences blurred, to the extent that
some detractors of video have already mourned the death
of cinema, claiming that it has been overtaken and
replaced by video. On the other hand, video can be seen
as an extension of cinema that has expanded and ampli-
fied the possibilities of what was called in the early days
"motion pictures." With the introduction of digital tech-
nology, the scope of cinema will only continue to
expand.

The history of video must take into account its many
distinct uses, from entertainment to surveillance, art to
home video. Although videotape was available in the
mid-1950s, it did not become widely used in television
broadcasting until the 1960s, at which time artists also
began to experiment with the technology. In the 1980s
home video recording became affordable and hugely
popular, along with VCRs and the proliferation of films
on video. While the former constituted a veritable revo-
lution in terms of access to the means of production, the
latter had an equally important impact on the distribu-
tion of cinema and the ways that movies are watched.
VCRs also made it possible to record television pro-
grams, giving TV viewers more control over broadcast
schedules.

MEDIUM SPECIFICITY

With the introduction of digital film and video, DVDs,
the Internet, and multimedia, video may become, retro-
spectively, an intermediary stage between cinema and
digital media. But as a medium with its own properties,
it plays an important role in the history of media insti-
tutions and aesthetics. The key difference between video
and film is that videotape is magnetically coated and
contains codes that trigger electronic signals to the pro-
jection apparatus, whether it be a TV monitor or a
projector. Although several different formats of videotape
exist, in general the information that can be stored in this
system is substantially less than that which is photograph-
ically printed on a strip of celluloid. Video images are
immediately recorded and accessible, whereas film, like
photography, needs to be chemically "developed" to
release images created by exposure to light. Both film
and video can now be produced digitally, but videotape,
like film, is an analog medium, which means that images
are captured and stored as continuously variable forms,
with gradations produced by the reflection of light.

Some of the techniques that video artists have used
include long takes, loops, low-definition imagery, surveil-
lance techniques, and multiple monitors. Shot durations
are significantly increased with video, which can run for
hours without the need to change reels of tape. Video is a
medium that lends itself to gallery installation, where
viewers are not expected to watch pieces from beginning
to end as they would a film, but to move in and out of
the ongoing temporality of the work. The video artist Bill
Viola (b. 1951), for example, uses very long takes to
capture the rhythms of nature, but also inserts special
effects to create a sense of magic or hyperrealism (/ Do

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Not Know What It Is I Am like [1986], The Reflecting
Pool [1977-1979]). The special effects available to the
video artist include electronic distortions of sound and
image. Viola records sound simultaneously with the
image, but he frequently slows both tracks down to create
slightly distorted soundscapes. Sadie Benning (b. 1973) is
one of many artists who uses a children's video format
(Pixelvision) to capture low-definition images with a very
shallow depth of field to create intimate, personal effects.
In the 1970s the technology lent itself to a minimalist
aesthetic, using real time to record performances, but as
the technology evolved so did the range of subjects,
styles, and effects.

Video art in gallery installations can involve compo-
nents such as closed-circuit connections in which per-
formers or gallery-goers appear live onscreen. Monitors
can be placed within sculptural spaces such as Nam June
Paik's (1932-2006) jungle installation TV Garden
(1974—1978), in which monitors of various sizes are
scattered among plants and running water, ironically
interrupting nature with technology. One of the specific
properties of video is sometimes described as the "flow"
of information, images, and sound; akin to the flow of
electricity that generates the image, and the ongoing flow
of TV that never really ends, the flow of video is a
transmission process. The image is continually being
made anew by the electronic circuitry of the tape and
the monitor. In video art the production of images is
often privileged over narrative information, although
many video artists, such as Lisa Steele in Birthday Suit
(1974), also work in a narrative mode, experimenting
with the codes of storytelling and performance.

Videotape's detractors are concerned about the loss
of information and reduced image quality of video. Poor
quality tape and "panned and scanned" movies on TV
are in many ways distortions of original films. Moreover,
video viewing typically takes place in less "controlled"
situations than film screenings. Whether it is located in
the home or in the gallery, in public spaces such as bars,
airports, or sides of buildings, video addresses its viewer
very differently than does cinema. Film theorists of the
1970s understood the film spectator as a fixed point in a
darkened auditorium, a paradigm that is fundamentally
altered with the video and television monitor. Thus it is
not only the electronic image that defines video, but the
apparatus of spectatorship it entails. The video spectator
is said to be more "mobile," more "empowered" than
the cinema spectator, who is glued to his or her seat and
supposedly gripped by the narrative unfolding on the
screen. When that same narrative is viewed on home
video, the spectator may leave the room, fast-forward
through the tape, or carry on a conversation while it
plays. This is precisely anathema to the experimental
filmmaker who has attempted to create a total aesthetic

viewing experience; at the same time, it has entailed a
shift in film theory away from narrative and toward issues
of spectatorship.

Because video is technologically so closely connected
to the cultural institutions of broadcast television, many
video artists engage not only with the formal properties
of the medium, but also with its affinities with TV. The
tapes made by the director Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
with Anne-Marie Mieville (b. 1945), Six fois deuxISur et
sous la communication (1976) and France/tour/detour/
deux/enfants (1977), are modeled on the TV-interview
documentary form, as is the work of Steve Fagin {The
Machine that Killed Bad People, 1990). The low costs of
video production have also made it possible for more
constituencies, outside the mainstream of corporate TV,
to produce for television. Paper Tiger Television, for
example, produced a series of activist, alternative critiques
of the media in the 1980s and 1990s. Igloolik Isuma
productions in Northern Canada, from which the film
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (which was shot on digital
video) emerged in 2002, produced dramatic and news
videos for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation as early as
1983.

The documentary potential of the medium, together
with its accessibility, has been among its chief contribu-
tions to global image culture, giving rise to the cheap
programming potential of reality TV, among other
things. Because of the low costs of shooting and editing,
filmmakers can collect more material more cheaply, and
with much less training. It has become a key tool for
activists and journalists, as well as for the multiple sur-
veillance activities of security and police. Perhaps the
most notorious instance of the documentary potential
of video was the amateur footage captured in 1992 of
Rodney King's beating by the Los Angeles police.

VIDEO IN FILM

Video has become in many ways the "everyday" form of
film, the dominant means for the circulation of images in
daily life. Film becomes, in contrast, a more specialized
practice, a more expensive activity for both producers and
viewers, who pay increasingly high ticket prices to see
films projected in theaters. Because video has become
part of everyday experience, filmmakers frequently
include video within their films, sometimes for the aes-
thetic contrast between the high-definition film image
and the low-definition video image. In Wim Wenders's
(b. 1945) diary-documentary Lightning Over Water
(1980), a film about the director Nicholas Ray (1911-
1979) and his death from cancer, another man, Tom
Farrell, is also making a documentary about the director,
and Wenders includes Farrell's footage as well as Farrell
himself with his video camera in his own film, suggesting

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a kind of rivalry between the videographer and the film-
maker over Ray's legacy. In Der Amerikanische Freund
{The American Friend, 1977), when a character is conned
into killing a man on the subway, his nervous escape
from the scene is captured on a set of surveillance mon-
itors. For Wenders, video is an important technique for
blending documentary and fictional modes.

Other filmmakers use video as a kind of wallpaper
environment for their characters. In Natural Born Killers
(Oliver Stone, 1994), a video image can be glimpsed in
almost every scene, either on a TV or projected right
onto the walls. One of the effects is to suggest that the
murderous couple in the film are products of a violent
media environment. Fictional video interviews played an
important role in Steven Soderbergh's (b. 1963) Sex, Lies,
and Videotape (1989), a film that kick-started the inde-
pendent film movement in the United States when it
won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in
1989. It also gave video a kinky cache, linking it to the
sexual fantasies and power games of the film. In all of
these instances, video features as a reflexive device that
enables filmmakers to comment on the production of
images within their films. The reality effects of their
own film images are necessarily put into question, even
while they are able to enhance the spectacular appeal by
creating images within images.

In the TV series The Sopranos (beginning in 1999),
which is shot on film, characters are often watching TV,
and those shows constitute intertextual references by
which The Sopranos comments on its own dramatic and
cultural status as a gangster narrative. In this series video
carries with it connotations of the archive, or a cultural
image-bank that filmmakers can draw on. In Atom
Egoyan's (b. 1960) film Exotica (1994), video functions
more as the repressed memory of one of the characters.
Footage of the main character's dead daughter and
departed wife, which he himself shot on video, is
replayed in grainy black and white in fragments that
haunt him, and indeed haunt the film itself as a repressed
memory.

Found footage practices have a long history in exper-
imental filmmaking, but video has made the tendency
much more accessible and prolific. Music videos began to
appear on TV in the 1980s, appropriating many techni-
ques, including found footage, from experimental film
practices. Music videos were also among the first com-
mercial media to adopt nonnarrative principles of con-
struction, deploying associative montage techniques,
special effects, and found imagery. A small genre of
"scratch video" emerged in the 1980s as well, when it
became possible for amateurs to copy and edit fragments
of commercial tape at home. This has evolved into the
projection of video collages at dance clubs. These non-

linear and nonnarrative uses of video opened up new
roles for visual media in everyday life.

DIGITAL MEDIA

Since the 1990s video has become increasingly enmeshed
with computer technologies, with a variety of repercus-
sions on film practices. So-called digital cinema effec-
tively combines techniques of film and video, further
blurring their differences. Films can be shot on film or
video and transferred to different formats for editing and
distribution. Digital editing is now the dominant mode
of film editing. Editing programs available for home
computers have once again democratized the means of
media production. Because digital information can be
combined and manipulated seamlessly, digitization of
music, sound effects, artwork, photography, and com-
puter-generated special effects enables a convergence of
media, and thus has become an important part of the
postproduction stage of filmmaking.

The media theorist Lev Manovich has suggested that
film is moving closer to animation with digital technol-
ogies and away from its photographic origins. Because
digital images can be manipulated on the level of repre-
sentation, through software available on home com-
puters, the film image is no longer always indexical:
what we see onscreen did not necessarily exist "in reality"
in front of the camera but may have been manufactured.
Thanks to digital media, the "visible evidence" of film
and photography can no longer be taken for granted.

On the other hand, the enhanced image and sound
quality of digital technology can also be exploited for a
greater sense of realism. Feature films that have been shot
entirely on digital video include Lars von Trier's (b. 1956)
Dancer in the Dark (2000), Wenders's Buena Vista Social
Club (1999), and Alan Cumming's The Anniversary Party
(2001). Von Trier, in particular, exploits lightweight dig-
ital camera equipment, which is easily hand-held, for the
intimacy it makes possible with his actors. In the low-tech
aesthetic of Kevin Smith's Dogma (1999), digital video
offers an inexpensive means of shooting with a smaller
crew and less ancillary equipment. Blown up to 35mm
film, the image is as sharp as an original film image, and
offers a cheap alternative for independent filmmakers who
have traditionally used 16mm film.

One of the key advantages of digital cinema is the
length of shots that are made possible, an especially
useful technique for films involving improvisational act-
ing and for documentary filmmaking. One of the more
experimental uses of digital technology is Mike Figgis's
(b. 1948) Timecode (2000), which shows four simulta-
neous long takes on a screen divided into four quadrants,
each corresponding to a different camera that follows the
actors as they improvise around a script set in a film

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Video

Bjd'rk (left) and Catherine Deneuve in Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000), which was shot entirely on digital video.
© MIRAMAX/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

production studio in Los Angeles. By contrast, Aleksandr
Sokurov's (b. 1951) Russkiy kovcheg {Russian Ark, 2002)
uses a single long camera movement for the entire film,
creating a fluid movement through an architectural space
that appears to be a literal movement through history.
The ninety-minute-long Steadicam shot was stored on a
hard disk system and was accomplished in a single take
following months of rehearsals with 867 actors in the
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Films produced entirely on digital equipment are
often transferred to film for theatrical release. On the
other hand, the video market has become such an impor-
tant aspect of the film industry that many films are
released "straight-to-video." This has created something
of a two-tiered system within the film industry, in which
only the most expensive productions and most promising
titles get released as "films."

VIDEO, PEDAGOGY, AND FILM SCHOLARSHIP

DVD technology has served as a catalyst for film history.
Many titles from the Hollywood archive, as well as

European, Asian, and other world cinemas, have been
released on DVD, often with "special features" including
critical commentary, outtakes, production documents,
directorial and other cast and crew testimonials, and mul-
tiple viewing choices such as subtitle languages and aspect-
ratios. In many instances the digitized sounds and images
restore the films to something approximating their orig-
inal forms. The DVD market provides an important
stimulus for expensive restoration projects.

The influence of video on film scholarship and the
teaching of film studies should not be underestimated, as
the advent of DVDs is only one step in a process that
began with the introduction of video as a tool for pre-
serving and distributing film titles. This has been espe-
cially important for films that are marginal to the
mainstream, including American B movies and cult
films, Japanese and other Asian films dating back to the
1930s, and the many riches of other world cinemas,
experimental cinema, and documentary cinema. Video
markets have enabled the circulation of titles among
collectors and scholars interested in film as a cultural
phenomenon. Many of these obscure titles have long

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since been unavailable on film, and it may be a long time
before they are released on DVD.

Film analysis was once performed on Steenbeck
editing machines, using reels of fragile celluloid. Since
the 1980s students and scholars have been able to view
the wealth of film history on videotape, which is much
more amenable to repeated viewings, rewinding, and
freeze-frames. Celluloid film is an extremely delicate
material and rapidly deteriorates with multiple projec-
tions, making the teaching of film difficult and expen-
sive. Few educational institutions were able to provide
the facilities for film viewing, or for film collections,
often relying on poor and decaying prints shown on
faulty projection equipment. Videotape is not a perma-
nent medium either, and DVD technology, too, will no
doubt eventually show its material weaknesses; but in the
mean time these technologies are an invaluable means of
preserving film history and making it accessible. It is
largely thanks to electronic media that film studies has
been able to find a place in educational institutions
around the world.

Video is not necessarily a competitor with film, or a
poor sibling, but perhaps an extension or augmentation
of film, especially as it evolves into digital technologies.
Video has enabled us to see film differently, perhaps as
something that is disappearing, but also as something

sensual, a communal experience that takes place in a dark
crowded theater. The cinema is a place we have to go to,
but video has become part of the world around us.

SEE ALSO Film History; Film Studies; Independent Film;
Spectatorship and Audiences; Technology; Television

FURTHER READING

Cubitt, Sean. Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture. New
York: St. Martin's, 1993.

Hall, Doug, and Sally Jo Fifer. Illuminating Video: An Essential
Guide to Video Art. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1990.

Hanhardt, John G., ed. Video Culture: A Critical Investigation.
Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1987.

Hark, Ina Rae. "'Daddy, Where's the FBI Warning?':

Constructing the Video Spectator." In Keyframes: Popular
Cinema and Cultural Studies. Edited by Matthew Tinkcom
and Amy Villarejo, 72-81. London: Routledge, 2001.

Manovich, Lev. "What Is Digital Cinema?" In The Digital
Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Edited by Peter
Lunenfeld, 172-192. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Renov, Michael, and Erika Suderburg, eds. Resolutions:

Contemporary Video Practices. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996.

Catherine Russell

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VIDEO GAMES

The field of computer game studies is a relatively new
one, especially in terms of detailed textual analysis of the
forms of games themselves (as opposed to studies based
on assumptions about their social or psychological
effects). A number of different theoretical paradigms are
in potential competition in current efforts to map the
field. Cinema might seem a logical point of reference for
many games, especially with the movement of adventure-
style games from text to animated graphical form, and
subsequently to three-dimensional graphics, a process
that began in the early 1980s. There are a number of
ways that games borrow from, or can be understood in
the light of, aspects of cinema. What must be avoided,
however, is an "imperialist" venture of the kind feared by
some game theorists (for example, Espen Aarseth's
Cybertext points out fallacies in the application of literary
theory to games). Perspectives drawn from the study of
film offer one set of tools with which to approach com-
puter-based games (although not all games or all types of
games), tools that might be more useful in highlighting
some aspects of games than others.

A number of areas of broad similarity, or overlap,
between games and cinema can be identified. Direct
movements from cinema to game are found in some
titles, including the games that have become obligatory
among the spinoff products from contemporary
Hollywood blockbusters and animated features. But
many games draw on cinematic resonances more gener-
ally in their use of audio-visual conventions.

If some games are based directly on films, or franch-
ises that include films, others are associated with genres
or subgenres, particularly in areas such as science fiction,
fantasy, and horror. Many games draw on iconographies

and audio-visual styles that can be linked to particular film
titles but that have become more widely prevalent: the
Blade Runner or The Lord of the Rings look, for example.
Some games draw on more specific and localized cine-
matic devices. A well known example is the "bullet-time"
mode used in the Max Payne action-adventure games
(2001, 2003), based on slow-motion bullet effects used
by the Hong Kong action director John Woo and espe-
cially its translation in The Matrix (1999). One mission
in the game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002)
includes a Normandy beach-landing sequence that fol-
lows almost exactly the initial moves of the film Saving
Private Ryan (1998).

It is important to acknowledge that there are major
differences between games and cinema, even in the case
of games with which cinema has the most in common.
Games clearly need to be studied on their own terms, the
criteria for which often diverge considerably from those
most relevant to cinema or any other media. The act of
comparison should not involve reduction of one medium
to the terms of another; it should, instead, be a way of
highlighting factors specific to each.

CUT SCENES AND POINT OF VIEW

The use of cinematic cut scenes in computer-based games
is one of the more obvious connections between cinema
and games. Cut scenes are short, pre-rendered sequences
in which the game player performs a role closer to that of
a detached observer than is the case in more active
periods of gameplay. Cut scenes tend to employ camera
movement, shot-selection, framing, and editing similar to
that used in cinema. Many games use cut scenes to

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Video Games

establish the initial setting, character and background
storyline. Opening cut scenes frequently employ the same
expository devices as cinema, using a combination of
long shots, medium shots, and close-ups to provide ori-
entation into the game-world for the player. Cut scenes
are also used at varying intervals throughout many games
to forward the storyline and to entice or reward players
with sequences of spectacular action, connect disparate
spaces, and provide dialogue between new playing char-
acters. They may be used to provide clues or to establish
enigmas that have a bearing on the narrative trajectory of
the game. Critics of the use of cinema as a reference point
for games often suggest that cut scenes provide the only
formal connection between the two because such scenes
are freer than interactive sequences to use the particular
formal devices associated with film (in sequences in
which the camera is able to break its usual connection
with the visual perspective of the player/character). Cut
scenes have, historically, been clearly marked by higher
visual qualities than interactive sequences, although this
has steadily been reduced with the advent of increased
graphics processing resources.

The point of view structure of games can also be
examined from a perspective informed by approaches to
the study of cinema: the specific ways, for example, in
which particular first- and third-person perspectives oper-
ate from moment to moment or from one game to
another. This is a complicated area that involves some
major differences between cinema and games. Pre-
rendered camera angles are used during gameplay in some
third-person shooter games, including Dino Crisis (1999)
and the Resident Evil (beginning in 1997) games made
before Resident Evil 4 (2005). Predetermined framing of
this kind departs from the point of view of the player/
character and functions like that of film, to some extent,
directing the attention of the player and creating visual
diversity though shifts in perspective. The point of view
that results is not anchored to the perspective of
the character played, however, and comes at the expense
of player freedom.

Pre-rendered framing is not found in first-person
games or in games designed to be playable in multi-
player mode (such as Quake [1996], Half-Life [1998],
EverQuest [1999] and World of Warcraft [2004]).
Framing that shifts perspective within gameplay sequen-
ces is perhaps more cinematic than that found in most
other types of games, although important differences
remain.

The first-person perspective used in many games is a
rarity in film in other than brief sequences (the major
exception is the 1947 noir film Lady in the Lake). This
point is highlighted by the limited extent to which it is
used even in the combat sequences of Wing Commander

(1999), a direct adaptation of the game. Third-person
cinema, by comparison, usually involves a much greater
and more fluid range of point of view orientations
between camera, protagonist and viewer than is found
in games. The intermittent fixed views offered within
games such as Resident Evil and Dino Crisis have a
rigidity that creates a very different, sometimes frustrat-
ingly limited, perspective on the action, although they
can function to create suspense by enabling the player to
see what awaits at a location not yet visible to the char-
acter. By contrast, role-playing games (RPGs) and "God"
games such as The Sims (2000), Civilization (1990),
Black and White (2001) or Settlers (2005)— in which
the player creates a world or presides over a society —
are among examples that demonstrate little cinematic
association in terms of formal strategies. In the 1990s some
"God" games, real-time strategy (RTS) games and RPGs,
such as the early entries of the Final Fantasy series (begin-
ning in 1990) and Baldur's Gate (1998), displayed the
field of battle or action in aerial mode. This fixed view
is opposed to the more varied shots found in cinema
and the restrictive tracking, point of view, and eye-level
shots that characterize first- and third-person games. In
later incarnations and with greater graphic processing
resources, players are able to "zoom" in and out of the
action. This enhanced facility accords with the prag-
matic value of the various viewpoints required to direct
and manage gameplay, and in moving from a fixed aerial
or three-quarters point of view to a more fluid and player-
led arrangement, greater cinematic resonance comes
into play. But the important difference is that the players
make the choice of "shot" to suit their situation.

Even where there are some cinematic resonances,
different devices of visual orientation operate in games
because of the relationships established between players
and the space-time coordinates of game-worlds.
Mainstream cinema has developed well established sys-
tems of spatial orientation, especially the continuity edit-
ing system, to avoid confusing the viewer during shifts from
one camera position to another. Many first- and third-
person games permit the player to look and move through-
out 360 degrees (as far as obstacles permit). This is possible
with less disorientation than would usually be expected in a
cinematic context because the player-character moves
through a particular virtual space in real-time with the
camera-view often anchored to a single viewpoint. Even
so, the exploration of 360-degree space in games can
become disorientating, especially when done under pres-
sure or in a rush (hence the frequent inclusion of maps
and compasses in games that require players to explore
large spaces). Games are far less likely than films to use
ellipses to eliminate "dead" time. Time in games may
be spent exploring the available space or interacting
with objects that do not have any significant bearing

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Milla Jovovich prepares to battle zombies in Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002), based on the popular video game.
© COLUMBIA/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

on the main set tasks. Most films give screen time only
to what is deemed essential to the storyline or the
building of character or mood. Action-adventure-type
games operate mainly in something closer to real-time
with ellipses occurring primarily at the end of levels or
chapters. This creates a significant difference between
the pace (and length) of games and that of films. Thus
despite the shared use of some aspects of framing, mise-
en-scene, dialogue, and music, the structuring of point-
of-view, time, and space are quite different.

DIGITAL ANIMATION

Some important developments in technologies, and the
formal capacity they offer for rendering versions of new
fictional worlds, are also shared between cinema and
games, most obviously in the area of digital animation.
The fact that new standards of realism in computer-
generated graphics are offered as one selling point of
games and animated films creates a point of crossover
between the two media. This is especially the case in a
film such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001),

based on the successful Final Fantasy game series. The
crossover between more overtly "fantastic" digital special
effects in live-action cinema and those used in games,
such as the morphing effects in Primal (2003) and
American McGee's Alice (2000), is another prominent
point of contact. Similar representational capacities are
drawn upon by the two media, a fact of significance to
the libraries of images, image-textures, and devices avail-
able to each. The availability of particular kinds of effects
might in some cases encourage particular types of pro-
duction. Horror and fantasy, for example, lend them-
selves especially well to the spectacular display of
fantastical morphing effects in both films and games.

This is another area in which differences are in play,
even when such fundamentally similar building blocks
are involved. The level of surface, visual realism attained
in the film version of Final Fantasy is higher — more
detailed — than that found in the interactive segments of
games contemporary with this film, mainly because pri-
orities other than graphical realism have an important
call on the hardware resources available during game

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processing. The same goes for the morphing effects in
Primal as compared to their equivalent on film. A similar
kind of transformation might be present in some films
and games, creating similar potential for the development
of narrative or spectacular effects. But the quality of
resolution — and, arguably, the importance of this factor
among others — remains different. These differences,
driven by substantially different priorities and agendas,
have various implications for effects produced in the
name of both realism and spectacular attraction for its
own sake.

Developments in graphics processing are closing the
gap, however, a promise that figures largely in advance
publicity claims for forthcoming products (software and
hardware), as is evident in each new generation of games
and games designed to take advantage of the capabilities
offered by new processing technologies. The develop-
ment of new generations of graphics technology contrib-
utes to the ability of games and cinema to create
increasingly spectacular audio-visual effects (realistic-
looking water and fire or dynamic lighting/shadows, for
example). And as processing power increases, animated
characters in tie-in games become more like the actors
who originally played them — in terms of both facial
features and movement (as is the case with the player/
character in Constantine [2005] , composed from motion-
captured movement, the recorded voice, and digital-
mapped face of the actor Keanu Reeves).

In a multiplayer online context, limitations of
telephony still have an impact on levels of graphical
realism, more detailed graphics creating a slower rate of
exchange between server and PC. Action-adventure-type
games and some types of cinema also share an investment
in the production of intense sensational experiences that
impact forcefully on the player or viewer. Varying com-
binations of rapid editing and unstable camerawork are
used in contemporary Hollywood action cinema to create
maximum sensation. Games sometimes mimic devices
used in Hollywood — the fireball impact effect, for exam-
ple — but they also take this a stage further, requiring a
frenzied response on the part of the player.

NARRATIVE AND PARTICIPATION

One of the most important points of difference between
film and games is the aspect of player participation. If
games can offer something like a cinematic experience, it
is made more complex by the fact that games are played,
engaged with, in a manner that is much more active and
formative of the resulting experience than is the case with
watching a film. However, opposition between game-
playing and film-viewing as a distinction between activity
on the one hand (games) and passivity on the other
(cinema) is not that simple. Film-viewing is far from a

passive experience; it involves a range of cognitive and
other processes in the act of interpretation and emotional
response.

Games, however, place a central importance on the
act of doing that goes beyond the kinetic and emotional
responses that might be produced by a film. To use the
term "interactive" to describe this dynamic is problem-
atic, however, as Espen Aarseth suggests. Taken literally,
the term can be applied so widely that it no longer has
the power to distinguish between the interactions that
occur between users and texts of all kinds, such as liter-
ature or cinema, with which games are often compared.
Aarseth proposed instead the term "ergodic" (derived
from the Greek ergon and hodos, meaning "work" and
"path"), to identify forms in which "nontrivial effort is
required to allow the reader to traverse the text" (1997,
p. 1), meaning an effort greater than that involved in
reading a novel or watching a film.

The player of video games has to respond to events
in a manner that affects what happens on screen, some-
thing not demanded of readers of books or viewers of
films. Success often depends on rapid responses, effective
hand-eye coordination and learned moves or skills made
through the use of devices such as keyboards or game-
pads, or puzzle-solving skills. Games are demanding
forms of popular audio-visual entertainment, requiring
sustained work that is not usually associated with the
experience of popular, mainstream cinema. It is possible
for players to "fail" a game, or to give up in frustration, if
they do not develop the skills demanded by the particular
title, a fate that has no equivalent in mainstream cinema.
Games are a participatory medium; the game-world is
left undiscovered, character capabilities left locked, and
story arcs do not unfold unless the player is actively
willing to build the specific skills required to progress
through a game.

Another key point of difference that is often high-
lighted between games and other media is the role of
narrative. Narrative, generally, plays a less important role
in games than it does in films, despite the widespread
claim that narrative has become attenuated in contempo-
rary Hollywood cinema. Narrative remains a central
component of even the special-effects driven Hollywood
blockbuster. Narrative is also present in many games:
narrative progress is sometimes offered as a reward for
successful gameplay, or provides a general context within
which gameplay is conducted; and in multiplayer games
many small narratives delivered in a range of ways pro-
vide the mythology that gives added meaning to a virtual
world. But, generally, narrative plays a role secondary to
engagement in more active gameplay.

Narrative rationales tend to disappear into the back-
ground during much of gameplay. Jesper Juul suggests

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that there is an inherent conflict between interactivity and
narrative: "There is a conflict between the now of the
interaction and the past or 'prior of the narrative. . . .
The relations between reader/ story and player/game are
completely different — the player inhabits a twilight zone
where he/she is both empirical subject outside the game
and undertakes a role inside the game" ("Games Telling
Stories.")- Narrative is preset, built into the fabric of a
game, available to be discovered or realized, in whole or
in part — or, in some cases, in one version or another,
depending on the paths taken by the player. Narrative
has happened, or been created, while "playing" is always
happening, a particular realization of the potential
offered by a game, the precise shape or outcome is
indeterminate.

The ideal suggested by the game designer Richard
Rouse is to achieve a balance between narrative as pre-
determined and structured into the game and the variable
"player's story" generated in each individual experience
of the game. The player's story "is the most important
story to be found in the game, since it is the story that the
player will be most involved with, and its is the story in
which the player's decisions have the most impact"
(pp. 216-217). Carefully predetermined narrative struc-
ture is necessary, however, to games in which dynamics
such as variable pace, tension, foreshadowing, and build-
ing towards a climax are important or desirable. The
extent to which narrative dimensions are experienced as
separate from, or part of, gameplay is also determined by
the kinds of storytelling devices used by individual
games. The sense that narrative is essentially separate
from gameplay is encouraged by the prevalence of what
Rouse terms "out-of-game" narrative devices, such as cut
scenes, that put gameplay on hold temporarily. Strongly
favoured by Rouse is the use of "in-game" devices to
provide story: signs, written notes, nonplaying character
(NPC) dialogue or behavior, and the design of levels.
In Half-Life, a first-person shooter with a narrative more
complex than similar games, information important to
the trajectory of the plot is provided within the game-
space. NPCs speak of what is happening without the
game shifting into a cut scene, the player-character
remaining free to move around as usual. The effect is a
sense of seamlessness close to that which might be
expected of mainstream cinema, even though created in
a different manner.

Moments of the most heightened and intensively
interactive gameplay often entail features such as cause/
effect relationships and linear progression (although the
latter, in particular, is far from guaranteed: it is quite
possible to regress, to lose ground, during activities such
as combat or the negotiation of difficult terrain). These
are qualities often associated with narrative, as, for exam-
ple, in David Bordwell's influential formulation of "clas-

sical" Hollywood narrative. By themselves, however, they
are not sufficient to constitute narrative or story, unless
defined at the minimal level. Moment-by-moment devel-
opments gain narrative resonance through their position
in a wider frame that is largely pre-established. Games
often balance player freedom with narrational devices
that shape and give structure to the player's experience,
including the provision of cues that guide the movement
of the player-character or music or sound effects that
warn of approaching danger, as is often the case in the
Silent Hill honor cycle (beginning in 1999). One of the
major dynamics of many games is the oscillation between
these different modes of engagement, the rhythm of
which often varies from one example to another.

REMEDIATION AND SYNERGY

Where games do borrow from cinema, this is for reasons
that are far from arbitrary. "New" media tends to borrow
from older equivalents more generally, as suggested by
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's concept of "reme-
diation." As they argue, the experience of playing com-
puter games that offer cinematic milieu might be
understood in terms of a move "inside" the world of
the cinema screen. The immediate thrill produced by
direct engagement in the interactive experience is often
based on a sense of "hypermediacy," of awareness that
the world occupied virtually is akin to that of other forms
of representation. Film-based or film-related video games
are sold at least partly on the basis of the attraction of an
occupation of worlds the contours of which have been
established in other media — most directly, in film, but
often also in literature, comic books, or television. The
player can, at one remove, become the central figure in a
cinematic milieu, following and extending the experience
offered by a film. Aliens vs. Predator 2 (2001), for exam-
ple, can be played from the perspective of either marine,
alien, or predator; here, the world of the game is
extended in terms of player participation and variation
of perspective/allegiance. A novelty offered by the game's
sequel is the ability to inhabit the life cycle of the alien,
something not available in the film. The cinematic
dimension, in this case, is a substantial component of
the specific experience offered by the game as a game,
and not merely something imported externally.

An incorporation of elements of the "cinematic" can
be a substantial component of some games. "Cinematic"
needs to be understood in terms of both textual devices
and intertextuality. Games draw on other media, includ-
ing television in many cases, but cinema is the remedi-
ated form to which attention is most often drawn by the
industry. The reason for this is the greater cultural pres-
tige enjoyed by cinema (as institution) and film (as a
medium of expression). Often publicists and reviewers

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claim that a game is very "cinematic," which is meant as
a positive assessment of quality, even if such hierarchies
of taste are resisted by some gamers and game theorists.
Visual iconography regularly crosses the boundary
between cinema and games, as do genres designed to
invoke kinetic experience, such as horror and action-
adventure. Audio styles associated with cinema have also
been used in games, including "cinematic" orchestral
music used to contribute to the "epic" quality sought
by some fantasy titles (portions of the soundtrack from
The Lord of the Rings films [2002-2003] are used in
World of Warcrafi, for example). The function of such
devices is to provide additional atmosphere for action, to
add resonance and meaning to the process of participa-
tion in the game-world.

Cinema and games are often produced and distrib-
uted by the same media corporations. Game spin-offs
offer substantial additional revenues to the Hollywood
studios. The Sony Corporation is the most obvious
example, home to both Sony Pictures and PlayStation.
In the year ending March 2004, sales and operating
revenue accounted for $7.1 billion from pictures and
$7.4 billion from games. In addition to such earnings,
tie-in games are also valued by Hollywood as a way of
attracting new audiences for major properties such as the
James Bond franchise. The development and production
process required by games has also come to take on some
of the characteristics, and scale, of the film business. Very
much on the model of contemporary Hollywood, the
games industry has become a hit-driven business. The
games industry also share with Hollywood the continued
use of "author" names, in some cases to sell products
within the anonymous corporate context.

A number of games, such as Tomb Raider (2001,
2003) and Resident Evil (2002, 2004) have been turned
into films, but these have generally not been very suc-
cessful and they tend to ignore the formal characteristics
of games (even if their protagonists might, on occasion,
face tasks similar to those in which the game player is
engaged). The same is true of films that have used games,
or imagined versions of future gaming, as part of their
subject matter, such as eXistenZ (1999) and Avalon
(2001). Films that draw on games at a formal level are
few and far between, the most cited example being Lola
rennt {Run Lola Run, 1998), which features a structure of
repetition-within-difference and a climactic time-out
device, both of which can be seen as a more substantial

remediation of some game characteristics than anything
found in the game tie-in examples cited above. Games
are also cited by the director as an influence (but one
among many) in Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003), the
bulk of which is composed of a lengthy series of tracking
shots in which the camera follows from behind the move-
ments of characters in an overlapping narrative structure
leading to a Columbine-style high school massacre (the
film also includes one fleeting shot during the massacre
that directly mimics the perspective of a first-person
shooter game played previously by the killers). Films
provide ready-made characters and narrative resonance
that can carry over and play into the experience of a
spin-off game, even where the dimension of character
and narrative are not greatly elaborated in the game itself.
This is an effect that is harder to achieve in reverse, as the
case of Super Mario Bros. (1993) shows. Computer games
are not a form of interactive cinema; the way games
interpolate players into their own spaces and engage them
in a particular range of tasks is very different from the
experience of watching a film.

SEE ALSO Merchandising; Narrative; Technology

FURTHER READING

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation:

Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kirstin Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York, Columbia University Press,
1984

Juul, Jesper. "Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and
Narratives." Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001). Available at
http:llwww.gamestudies. org/01 01/juul-gts/

King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska, eds. Screenplay: Cinema/
Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wallflower Press, 2002.

Newman, James. Videogames. New York and London: Routledge,
2004.

Rouse, Richard. Game Design: Theory and Practice. Piano, TX:
Wordware Publishing, 2001.

Wolf, Mark J. P., and Bernard Person, eds. The Video Game
Theory Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Geoff King
Tanya Krzywinska

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VIETNAM WAR

After France withdrew its troops from Indochina in
1954, its former colony was partitioned by the Geneva
Accords into North and South until elections could be
held to determine the leadership of a united Vietnam.
Fearing that Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)— leader of the
North who with the Viet Minh had defeated French
troops at Dien Bien Phu — would succeed in uniting the
nation as a communist state, the United States supported
the South. Over the next decade, US military support for
the South escalated, culminating in 1964 air strikes over
North Vietnam and the deployment of ground troops the
following year. Although the conflict was never officially
declared as a war, it was represented and fought as such.
By 1975, when the last remaining Americans were air-
lifted from Saigon, the United States had used in
Vietnam over twice the amount of military force that it
expended in World War II in both the European and
Asian theaters; despite its efforts, North and South
Vietnam were united as the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam in 1976.

Through advanced firepower and chemical weap-
onry deployed during more than a decade of military
involvement in the region, the United States and its allies
succeeded in transforming Vietnam's political, economic,
and social realities. But this transformation was not the
one envisioned by US political leaders; nor was it the one
communicated to the American people when they
embarked upon military action in the area. A conflict
that had a lasting effect on both the American culture
and the Vietnamese culture, the Vietnam War as por-
trayed in US cinema bears witness to the difficulty the
government had in promoting the cause of this war
during the conflict and its problematic status in US

popular culture for decades to come. Ultimately, the
Vietnam War demonstrated both the terrible power and
the limitations of America's political aims and national
ideology as they were deployed by military action and
promoted by the fantasy-making apparatus of cinema.

AMERICAN CINEMA AND THE CHALLENGE OF
VIETNAM: 1964-1975

In contrast to the central role played by Hollywood in
World War II, representations of the Vietnam War were
rare in mainstream American cinema while US troops
occupied Southeast Asia. Although a variety of fiction
films referenced or showed the influence of the war, few
combat films were made about Vietnam during the
period of actual combat. Instead, the primary media
representation of combat was television news coverage.
Because Vietnam was the first "television war," some
critics have surmised that an excess of and explicitness
in television coverage made the combat film unappealing
to audiences — just as some government leaders accused
the news media of turning the population against the
cause of war. Some vivid, even horrifying, images of the
war appeared in print and on television; yet content
analyses of television news has shown that, on the whole,
war coverage was neither as plentiful nor as sensational as
its critics have suggested.

Other factors, both industrial and ideological, appear
to have had a more direct effect on the production of war
films during the period. Hollywood studios were suffer-
ing in the late 1960s from a recession brought on by
post- World War II industrial and cultural changes and
by their consequent investment in some disastrously

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Vietnam War

unsuccessful blockbuster films. Likewise, there was some
difficulty in finding appropriate means to communicate
the goals of America's action in Vietnam, as the US
government discovered in its failed attempt to utilize
techniques drawn from World War II documentary for
its first Vietnam-era production, Why Vietnam? (1965).
Its title and style deliberately echo Frank Capra's Why We
Fight series (1943-1945), as did its rhetorical methods: it
attempted to bring a clear moral purpose to the US role
in Southeast Asia by comparing Ho Chi Minh to Hitler
and Mussolini, thereby representing US action as primar-
ily defensive. It was publicly criticized in 1967, and in
1971 the US Department of Defense report United
States-Vietnam Relations, 1945—1967 (also known as the
Pentagon Papers) revealed that it had included deliberate
misrepresentations. Troubled in its reception, the docu-
mentary never achieved its hoped for audience; and,
although it continued to be shown to troops, it was
pulled from civilian distribution. Similarly unsuccessful
in its effort to present the nobility of the American cause,
the US Information Agency documentary Vietnam!
Vietnam! (1971), a full-color feature-length film execu-
tively produced by Hollywood veteran John Ford, was
made for international distribution that it never achieved;
its clear-cut representations of good versus evil were no
longer, considered relevant by the time of its release.
Thus for economic and political reasons, both
Hollywood studios and the US government were hesitant
to put this new war on screen. As a result, by 1970 a
number of otherwise successful screenwriters, such as
Samuel Fuller, Sy Barlett, and Stanley Kramer, had
scripts in circulation that focused on the Vietnam War,
but they found no support from studios or from the
Pentagon. At the Pentagon, the Department of Defense
Motion Picture Production Branch supported only one
film during the war, with an estimated $ 1 million worth
of military hardware and expertise: John Wayne's The
Green Berets (1968). Studio and governmental reluctance
to support projects dealing with Vietnam highlighted
what appeared to be the particular difficulty of telling
its story — or at least the difficulty of applying the generic
formulae that had worked for previous wars, whereby the
cause of America is transparently good, the enemy unde-
niably evil, combat goals clearly defined, and failure
unthinkable.

The few combat films made about the Vietnam War
during the conflict reflect these difficulties: The Green
Berets as well as A Yank in VietNam (1964), Operation
C.I.A. (1966), and To the Shores of Hell (1965) made an
effort to fit America's complex relation with Vietnam
within the parameters of the classic Hollywood narrative
and the combat genre, by focusing on a well-defined
mission or target; and, each is marked with its own type
of ambiguity. Most notable in these terms is the The

Green Berets, which applied generic elements of both
the World War II combat film and the western in its
effort to depict the heroism of the Special Forces and
their struggle to protect Vietnamese peasantry from the
hostile "Cong." An attempt to garner support for the war
when, according to a 1967 poll, public opinion was
beginning to move in opposition, it tells the story of a
cynical journalist who is swayed to the cause of the
war when he witnesses enemy atrocities. In doing so,
the film dramatizes the notion that only eyewitnesses
can really understand America's war in Vietnam, a war
unlike previous wars because its nature and purpose are
effectively unrepresentable. The difficulty of understand-
ing and representing Vietnam and its consequent differ-
ence from previous wars are themes that persisted in
its fictional — and documentary — representations. Films
such as the Oscar®-winning documentary feature La
Section Anderson {The Anderson Platoon, 1967) and
A Face of War (1968) underplayed political explanation
and contexts to focus instead on the day-to-day experi-
ences of war and privileged the "grunt" point of view as
the primary site of knowledge about the war.

VETERANS AND ALLEGORIES: 1964-1975

For many critics, the failure of The Green Berets to tell an
accurate story of the war and to find and persuade an
audience signaled the end of the combat film as a genre.
For the duration of the war, Vietnam was represented on
screen not by images of battle but by images of the war's
veterans. Films focusing solely on individuals tended to
depoliticize and personalize the conflict. The earliest of
these were low-budget, independently produced "exploi-
tation" pictures that incorporated Vietnam veterans into
narratively simple, sensationalist, and action-oriented
biker, blaxploitation, and horror films designed to capi-
talize on the topicality of Vietnam. Later these films
would be joined by a few independent features, studio-
produced exploitation pictures, and made-for-television
melodramas. Taken together, they demonstrate the way
that Vietnam was first imagined on screen as primarily a
domestic problem for the United States and as a violent
disruption of the status quo — another thematic trope
that continued in representations of the war well after
1975.

Biker films produced by companies such as
American International Pictures (AIP) featured violent
veterans, often characterized as former Green Berets
whose fighting skills are used in and against the United
States. In such films, war's violence comes home with the
veteran who fights against the police, the establishment,
and other gangs, as in Angels from Hell (1968) or The
Hard Ride (1971); or veterans may take over the role of
the police as dispensers of vigilante justice, as in The Born

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Losers (1967) and Chrome and Hot Leather (1971).
Although such films had little to say about the war
directly, their emphasis on the rage and violence of
veterans is worth noting — particularly given the fact that
they were most heavily distributed in those rural and
urban areas of the United States where the draft hit
hardest. Of particular interest in these terms are black-
themed action or blaxploitation films that featured black
veterans who return to battle the mob, drug dealers, and
murderers of their family and friends. In the way that
such films as Slaughter (1972), Black Gunn (1972), and
Gordon's War (1973) focused on black communities and
families alienated from white lawmakers and official
sources of power, they blended references to the
Vietnam War with representations of militant black
power. In doing so, they obliquely referenced the polit-
icization of black soldiers and civilians and their opposi-
tion to a war viewed as irrelevant to the needs and
priorities of black America.

In addition to these action-oriented films, low-
budget horror films likewise featured violent veterans as
a metonym for war brought home to America. Such films
as Psycho a Go-Go (1965) and The Crazies (1973) asso-
ciated the war with psychosomatic transformations that
produce monsters. The low-budget Canadian-produced
Deathdream (also known as Dead of Night, 1972) voiced
tacit criticism through its graphic horror, as an undead
veteran systematically takes revenge on the family and
community members who sent him to war.

Outside of generic exploitation formats, other low-
budget independent productions dealt with many of the
same tropes of war invading the home through the figure
of the veteran. Such films offered space for directors
blocked from mainstream production to comment on
the war and its effects, for the low-budget milieu of the
domestic melodrama or the art cinema feature allowed
them to circumvent Pentagon support and the large-
scale, studio-based funding required for films in the
combat genre. For instance, when Elia Kazan was unable
to obtain studio backing for his Vietnam War screen-
plays, he shot what he called a "home movie," using his
own home as a set and a script written by his son, Chris.
In The Visitors (1972), which mixes family melodrama
with graphic violence, veterans visit an old buddy who
testified against them for war crimes, kill his dog, and
rape his wife before leaving. Brian De Palma's Greetings
(1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970) work for more comic effect
with draft dodgers and psychotic veterans who blend in
with the generally surreal landscape that is De Palma's
vision of America during the war years.

By 1971 low-budget films featuring violent vets had
become lucrative enough to attract the interest of
Hollywood, in particular, the sequel to Born Losers,

Billy Jack (1971), which by 1973 had grossed $60 million
and attracted a family audience with its fight-for-peace
vigilantism. Just as in the 1960s Hollywood studios had
borrowed aspects of European art cinema to win over
younger and more educated audiences no longer inter-
ested in its standard family entertainment fare, in the
1970s they imported plotlines, marketing strategies, and
exhibition techniques from exploitation pictures. Along
with simplified plots and sensational violence, they took
up the theme of returned veterans-turned-violent vigi-
lantes: in 1973 Magnum Force and The Stone Killer and
their stars Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, respec-
tively, ushered in a new generation of action heroes. By
the mid-1970s the figure of the violent, often psychotic,
veteran was so familiar that in Taxi Driver (1976) a brief
mention of Vietnam provides ample motivation for
the psychosocial and physical transformations experi-
enced by its troubled protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert
De Niro).

At the same time that the combat genre was replaced
by films that represented the war indirectly in the person
of the returned Vietnam veteran, and low-budget exploi-
tation films capitalized on Americans' emotional
responses to Vietnam, some mainstream productions
appeared to offer covert criticism of the war. The west-
ern, like the combat film, had long served as a vehicle for
America's perception of itself and its history, offering
mythic representations of the frontier, Manifest
Destiny, the relation between civilization and wilderness,
and the nature of heroism and masculinity. Released after
revelations of the My Lai massacre in 1969, revisionist
westerns like Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1970),
and Ulzana's Raid (1972) appeared to reference such
atrocities in their representation of violence between
Native Americans and white settlers; in doing so, they
critically reconsidered the mythic basis of American iden-
tity and offered a tacit critique of US policies in
Southeast Asia. Such allegorical representations notwith-
standing, explicitly antiwar films were as rare in
American mainstream cinema as combat films were dur-
ing the conflict. However, the year after US troops were
withdrawn, the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds
(1974), which combined archival footage and interviews
with veterans to excite emotional responses against the
war, was widely distributed throughout the United States
and won an Academy Award® the same year.

AMERICAN CINEMA AFTER THE WAR

Fewer representations of Vietnam veterans appeared on
screen for several years after the withdrawal of troops, but
this changed with a series of films, such as Who '11 Stop the
Rain (1978), Coming Home (1978), and Birdy (1984),
that featured violent or victimized veterans who stand in

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317

Vietnam War

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

b. Detroit, Michigan, 7 April 1939

Francis Ford Coppola is an independent whose career has
undergone wide fluctuations both in critical and popular
reception and in financial resources. A major figure of the
so-called "movie brat" generation, he emerged in the
1960s among the wave of filmmakers who had studied
film formally before making them. Known primarily for
The Godfather trilogy — The Godfather (1972), The
Godfather: Part II (1974), and The Godfather: Part III
(1990) — Coppola's greatest achievement in film may be
his Vietnam war epic, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Raised in a family involved in the arts, in the early
1960s Coppola studied film at UCLA, a program that has
produced a number of other important filmmakers. While
still in film school he worked on several films, including
his first feature, Dementia 13 (1963) for B-movie king
Roger Corman. Coppola's thesis project, the youth
comedy You're a Big Boy Now (1966), was distributed
theatrically by Warner Bros. He established his own
production company, American Zoetrope, in 1969, but
the company foundered financially and eventually filed for
bankruptcy. The Conversation (1974), about a troubled
surveillance expert, which he wrote and directed, garnered
both Oscar® nominations and a Palme d'Or at the Cannes
Film Festival; the film displayed Coppola's art-film
aspirations, but the commercial success of The
Godfather — at one point it ranked as the most successful
film of all time — was more influential on Coppola's
career.

Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Conrad's
novella Heart of Darkness, is the story of a Special Forces
captain (Martin Sheen), who is assigned to travel up the
Nung river in Cambodia during the Vietnam War in
search of an infamous rogue officer (Marlon Brando) , who
has established his own violent cult society somewhere
upriver, and "terminate him with extreme prejudice." The

making of the film was plagued by a number of legendary
difficulties (as well as a ballooning budget); as a result of
long delays in production, the film loses a degree of
narrative coherence but gains in its place an almost
hallucinatory power in evoking the absurdity and
confusion of a war that few Americans understood.

Coppola's career since Apocalypse Now has been
uneven. One from the Heart (1982), his first film after
Apocalypse Now, is fascinating as a stylish musical set
entirely in an expressionist Las Vegas, but it failed to
connect with audiences. The overblown Bram Stoker's
Dracula (1992) was more successful at the box office; his
two adaptations of S. E. Hinton's novels about youth
growing up in 1960s Oklahoma, Rumble Fish (1983) and
The Outsiders (1983), are among his most interesting
work. Coppola also has produced films by other important
directors such as Wim Wenders and Akira Kurosawa and
been involved in a number of publishing ventures.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The

Godfather: Part II '(197 '4), Apocalypse Now (1979), Gardens
of Stone (1987), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

FURTHER READING

Chown, Jeffrey. Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola. New

York: Praeger, 1988.
Kolker, Robert Philip. A Cinema of loneliness: Penn, Stone,

Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2000.
Phillips, Gene D. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford

Coppola. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
, ed. Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's

life. New York: Crown Publishers, 1999.

Barry Keith Grant

for the war's effects on America. Coming Home, for
example, narrowly focuses its antiwar message on the
damage inflicted on the bodies and minds of American
soldiers. It seeks to resolve the problems of war — which it
imagines primarily as problems of masculine identity —
within the conventions of melodrama, by working

through a love triangle that includes two veterans with
very different perspectives on the war and their role as
soldiers, along with the political-but-bankable star, Jane
Fonda.

The most notable change in the cinematic representation
of Vietnam after the war was that mainstream filmmakers

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Vietnam War

Francis Ford Coppola. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED
BY PERMISSION.

appeared to feel confident enough in their audience to put
Vietnam combat on screen for the first time. Late 1970s war
films reflected Americans' ambivalence about — and its
exhaustion from — the war. The Boys in Company C (1978)
and Go Tell the Spartans (1978), both relatively modest but
carefully scripted encounters with the madness of that war,
attracted little critical response. By contrast, Michael
Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford
Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) both won multiple awards
for their epic treatments of the war and its insanity. Cimino's
film portrayed the effects of war on a community of second-
generation Ukranian-American steelworkers, employing a
blend of naturalism (in setting, acting, cinematography)
and fantasy (motifs of the "one shot" of Russian roulette)
designed to evoke an emotional response to its image of
shattered innocence and belief. The stylistic excesses of
Coppola's film, offering a nearly surrealist image of the war,
were used in a similar way to evoke a subjective sense of the
war's losses. Garnering praise for their style, performances,
and direction, both films were also strongly criticized for their

lack of historical specificity. Instead of a historically accurate
depiction of the war, they offered a mythic space in which
national and personal ideals were explored and challenged.
Rather like Hollywood's representation of the West in fron-
tier days, such representations were best understood not
according to their historical veracity, but in terms of their
applicability to the contemporary values and beliefs of the
audience.

The films that followed in the early 1980s likewise
constructed a mythic Vietnam: the POW/MIA revenge
films Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984),
and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) all combined the
spectacular elements of action cinema with right-wing
nationalistic fantasy to refigure the vigilante of 1970s exploi-
tation cinema as a lone veteran who returns to Vietnam, this
time "to win." In each case the focus of the veteran/soldier's
quest is the MIA/POW: soldiers unaccounted for after the
repatriation of POWs in 1973 were, according to the logic
of these films, still alive; likewise, the Vietnam War had
never ended. A complex figure, despite the simplicity of its
film treatment, the MIA/POW of these films stands in for
all that was lost during the turbulent period of the war,
including trust in the government in the wake of the reve-
lations of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The vigilante
heroes of these films fight as much against government
corruption as they do against evil communists; the films
offer narrative engagements with the numerous conspiracy
theories that circled around America's conduct of the war
and its treatment of its own soldiers.

During the latter half of the 1980s, a more recogniz-
able war returned to the screen in such films as Platoon
(1986), Hamburger Hill (1987), Full Metal Jacket (1989),
Casualties of War (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989),
and 84C MoPic (1989). These works made a stylistic shift
from the action-adventure films that preceded them in the
first part of the decade; they were marketed and praised for
the realism, authenticity, and verifiability of their presenta-
tion of war. Employing the generically familiar traits of the
World War II combat film, they reference extra-cinematic
authorities, eyewitness accounts, and real historical events
to buttress their claims to historical truth. They provided a
sense of authenticity in their settings, with 1960s fashions,
consumer goods, and recognizable locations. They were
perhaps most persuasive — and influential on the war
film — in their representation of the visual and aural texture
of battle; We Were Soldiers (2002), which depicts the war's
first major battle of 1965, is evidence of their ongoing
influence. While a film like Apocalypse Now affected viewers
with the surreality of its image of Vietnam, these films
focused instead on its visceral character: their sense of
verifiability was confirmed by camera movement that ref-
erenced combat and documentary reportage; and their
soundtracks heightened the effect with period rock music,
bone-shaking weapons' fire, and the slap-thud of Hueys.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

319

Vietnam War

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) offered a surrealist vision of the war in Vietnam. © UNITED ARTISTS/
COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Yet, at the same time that they offered a Vietnam
never before seen — or heard — on screen, the representa-
tions of combat in these 1980s films were indebted to
earlier representations of the war that likewise invoked the
individual, eyewitness experience as the key to understand-
ing it. Similar in these terms was the TV-documentary
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987), made
for HBO and later given theatrical release. Featuring dra-
matic readings of letters from soldiers, their families, and
their loved ones, it emphasizes personal experience over
politics and ideology to produce a therapeutic text of
remembrance. Its critics viewed it as a profoundly political
film, however, for the way that it forestalled any critical or
oppositional stance toward the war via its emotional
engagement with the soldiers' experience.

In the 1990s and 2000s, following the American
victory in the Cold War and its — somewhat anticlimactic
and short-lived — triumph in the Persian Gulf, the
Vietnam War was less prevalent on screen, despite the fact
that documentaries such as Daughter from Danang
(2002) — which recounted the reunion of an Amerasian
woman and her Vietnamese mother — served as a reminder
of the ongoing effects of war on both soldiers and non-
combatants. Some critics observed that the popularity of
Forrest Gump (1994) signaled the end of America's strug-
gle with this chapter of its history: its slow-witted protag-
onist's affability and ignorance effectively smoothed the
edges of every major event of the 1960s in which he
unwittingly participated — including the Vietnam War.
Nevertheless, Coppola's remixed and restored Apocalypse
Now Redux (2001) seems as relevant as its 1979 predeces-
sor as a film that recognizes and confronts the madness
and excess of war: Vietnam was not the first — or last —

conflict to inspire such films, but they are an important
part of its legacy in American cinema.

SEE ALSO Genre; Historical Films; Violence; War Films

FURTHER READING

Adair, Gilbert. Hollywood's Vietnam: From "The Green Berets " to
"Apocalypse Now". New York: Proteus, 1981.

Anderegg, Michael, ed. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and
Television. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991.

Auster, Albert, and Leonard Quart. How the War Was

Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Praeger,
1988.

Berg, Rick. "Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of

Technology." Cultural Critique 3 (1986): 92—125.
Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to

Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Hansen, Miriam. "Traces of Transgression in Apocalypse Now."

Social Text! (Fall 1980): 123-135.
Howell, Amanda. "Lost Boys and Angry Ghouls: Vietnam's

Undead." Genders 23 (1996): 297-334.
James, David. "Rock and Roll in Representations of the Invasion

of Vietnam." Representations 29 (l990): 78-98.
Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York:

Scribner's, 1975.
Springer, Claudia. "Defense Department Films from World War

II to Vietnam." Cultural Critique 3 (Spring 1986): 151-167.

Studlar, Gaylyn, and David Desser. "Never Having to Say You're
Sorry: Rambo's Rewriting of the Vietnam War." Film
Quarterly 42, no.l (1988): 9-16.

Walker, Mark. Vietnam Veteran Films. Metuchen, NJ and
London: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Amanda Howell

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VIOLENCE

The representation of violence in the cinema has been a
topic nearly as contentious as sexuality for those con-
cerned with what is proper for the content of film. Yet
censorship organizations have focused less on violence
than on sexual images or images suggestive of various
forms of gender liberation. Cursory application of psy-
choanalytic theory provides at least tentative answers for
this: Western civilization, heavily influenced by organized
religion, has been fairly obsessed with policing the body
and in controlling sexual conduct of both men and
women. Freudian and post-Freudian thinking has postu-
lated that the libido is policed in such fashion as to
channel its energies to the service of commerce and state
interests. Violent acts — from sports to warfare — have
been theorized as a way of providing a safety valve for
errant sexual energies. Violence has been viewed, if the
cinema is any guide, as a reasonably acceptable form of
human expression in a highly competitive civilization
that sanctions warfare as a way for states to settle
grievances.

There are variations to this acceptance, as becomes
plainly obvious when observing how the Production
Code and organizations such as the Catholic Legion of
Decency regulate the violent image. The regulatory proc-
ess often sanctions violent images that conform to stand-
ing political and moral values, but disallows those that
challenge capitalism and notions of social normality. In
general, the European cinema has taken a progressive
attitude toward images of violence, showing its conse-
quences or using it to jolt the complacent spectator, as
with the graphic scenes of bloodshed in Sergei
Eisenstein's masterpieces Stachka {Strike, 1925) and
Bronenosets Potyomkin {Battleship Potemkin, 1925), or

the shock effect of the sliced eyeball in Luis Bunuel's
and Salvador Dali's Un chien andalou {An Andalusian
Dog, 1929).

BEGINNINGS

Since its inception, American cinema has been fascinated
with violence. A breakthrough film in the development
of narrative was Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train
Robbery (1903). Filmed in New Jersey, this proto-western
suggests the appealing, deeply embedded nature of vio-
lence in the frontier experience and the American civiliz-
ing process, and the rather spontaneous way that the
attendant violence appears in the earliest developments
of cinema. The film's final image, of a mustachioed
gunman firing a revolver directly at the camera/spectator,
became iconic on several levels, not least of which was the
assault on the audience effectuated by the violent image.
The film's explicit idea — that one takes what one wants
with the use of guns — has been said by various directors
and critics to be a controlling idea of the American
cinema. Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) concludes GoodFellas
(1990) with an image of the actor Joe Pesci firing at the
camera in a manner replicating the final shot of The
Great Train Robbery.

While regional censorship as well as internal industry
monitoring had some impact on the amount of violence in
the early cinema, film at its inception contained startling
scenes of graphic violence. D. W. Griffith's (1875-1948)
Intolerance (1916) is notable not only for its baroque
parallel narratives, but also for its scenes of decapitation,
dismemberment, and stabbings. A conservative populist,
Griffith surprises contemporary audiences with the

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Violence

"Jenkins Mill" sequence in Intolerance, which is a loose
reconstruction of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in which
the National Guard and hired goons gunned down strik-
ing coal miners opposed to the brutal labor policies of the
Rockefeller family. A director of great contradictions —
most obviously in his racist rendering of the Civil War,
The Birth of a Nation (1915) — Griffith was among the
early American filmmakers who believed that the por-
trayal of violence must be uncompromised to show its
consequences for humanity. Other works of the early
American cinema such as Erich von Stroheim's Greed
(1924), based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris,
offered a gritty portrayal of a rapacious society, culminat-
ing in a famous grueling scene in Death Valley in which
the protagonist pistol-whips his pursuer to death before
expiring of heat exhaustion.

The relatively free use of violence in early American
film narrative did not go unnoticed by various bodies that
saw Hollywood culture as a "new Babylon," and its films as
depraved renderings of human civilization. In order to fend
off increasing calls for government censorship, the
Hollywood industry worked out an arrangement to police
all in-house productions. In 1922 the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) was
constituted. It was chaired by former postmaster general
Will Hays (1887-1937), hence it was commonly referred
to as the Hays Office. The Hays Office developed within
ten years an enforcement arm with a rigid and complicated
set of rules known as the Production Code Administration
(PCA). The monitoring of films in production by the PCA
eventually was effected by an agreement worked out
between the industry and two representatives of the
Catholic Church — Daniel Lord, a priest, and Martin
Quigley, an ultraconservative writer and publisher. As the
Catholic Church played an increasing role in the monitor-
ing of Hollywood, the industry balked at restrictions placed
on their creativity, and this conflict led to the establishment
of the Studio Relations Committee, whose intent was to
negotiate differences between the studios and the PCA. The
PCA focused not merely on violence but especially on all
forms of sexual expression outside of heterosexual mar-
riage — which itself had to be presented within strict and
rather absurd guidelines (for example, married couples had
to be depicted as sleeping in separate beds). As the industry
complained, the Catholic Church took renewed steps to
pressure filmmakers by forming in 1934 the Catholic
Legion of Decency, which put in place a rating system that
could "condemn" or render "morally objectionable" films
seen as indecent. The Legion had a powerful influence not
only on the Catholic audience but also on general public
perception of Hollywood fare. Joseph Breen (1890-1965),
a Catholic known for rabidly anti-Semitic views, became
head of the PCA in 1934; the office and its policies were
often referred to as the "Breen Code."

Despite the increasingly rigid policing of films from
within and without the industry, film directors tried to
subvert the Code. Images of violence could be portrayed
so long as they fit within the moral and political precepts
of the PCA. Three popular films of the early 1930s,
released before the Code took hold, Public Enemy
(1931), Scarface (1932), and Little Caesar (1931), popu-
larized the gangster film, in part due to fascination with
small- and big-time criminals as rebel figures during the
Prohibition era and the first years of the Great
Depression. These three films were in many respects test
cases for later violations of the Production Code. While
all three contained scenes of shootings and acts of sadistic
violence, they presented themselves as public-service films
aimed at addressing conscientiously (rather than glamor-
izing) the image of the criminal, and at debunking crime
as a form of social rebellion. Public Enemy, Scarface, and
Little Caesar all conclude with the demise of the "villain"
(who actually is the most charismatic figure in all three
films). But because this basic moral point — that crime
doesn't pay — is hammered home in these films, the Code
rules that were violated — including one that forbade the
depiction of a gunman and the person being shot in the
same frame — were violated with impunity.

Censorious intervention on the subject of violence
sometimes had disastrous and counterproductive results,
as is so often the case in matters of censorship. A key
example is the treatment of James Whale's Frankenstein
(1931). The horror film was seen as an inherently low-
brow and immoral genre by church groups and other
authorities, and it came under even greater scrutiny than
the crime film in regard to the rendering of violence. In
an important scene in Frankenstein, the monster, bril-
liantly played by Boris Karloff, encounters a little girl
playing with flowers by a pond. The monster, who
behaves like an overgrown child, joins the girl in her
game of tossing flowers on the pond to watch them float,
then innocently throws the child onto the pond to see if
she too will float. When she drowns, the monster
becomes alarmed and flees into the forest. Regional cen-
sorship boards preempted the Code and demanded that
much of this sequence be removed, so instead of seeing
the monster's innocence in his play, and his panic when
the girl drowns, we only see the monster reaching for the
child, then the film cuts to an image of the girl's father,
in a state of shock, carrying his dead child through the
local village, the girl's stockings around her ankles. This
edit of the film remained in circulation as the standard
version of Frankenstein for more forty years. The audi-
ence is led to imagine all sorts of images of child moles-
tation and murder, and the notion of the monster as
actual victim, scorned and persecuted by his creator/
father, is turned upside down in service of a perverse,
simpleminded morality.

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WORLD WAR II AND AFTERMATH

World War II brought the War Information Office, a
collaboration between the US government and
Hollywood that produced not only newsreels that func-
tioned as propaganda for the Allied effort, but also a
variety of fiction and nonfiction films that portrayed
the Axis powers as monstrous while overlooking entirely
the economic origins of the war. War films such as
Bataan (1943) were allowed a surprising amount of
sanctioned and savage violence because they demonized
the evil "Jap." Postwar films such as The Sands of Iwo
Jima (1949) portrayed violence as rather bloodless and
painless as they lionized sacrificial violence and heroism;
at the time, this was Hollywood's standard approach to
the subject. The war years saw changes within other
genres too, such as the crime film. Raoul Walsh's High
Sierra (1941) took on the PCA by portraying the gang-
ster as a hero of the people who sympathized with victims
of the Great Depression. The gun violence of the alien-
ated gangster in High Sierra was tolerated since he is
brought down by the police at the end, although it is
clear with whom the film's sympathies rest.

World War II was a transitional moment in
Hollywood's portrayal of violence, as the industry and
the nation began to think through the implications of the
war and what instructions it offered about humanity.
Crime films such as Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death
(1947) and Walsh's White Heat (1949) focused on the
criminal psychopath, suggesting the influence of
Freudianism on mass consciousness as well as the more
general notion that social ills could not be attributed to a
few "bad boys," as in previous renderings of criminal
violence. Kiss of Death features a scene showing the crazed
hoodlum Tommy Udo (Richard Widwark) shoving a
wheelchair-bound old woman down a staircase; Cody
Jarrett 0ames Cagney) in White Heat brutally dispatches
his enemies, and ends his own life in an apocalyptic gun
battle that results in a Hiroshima-like explosion at an oil
depot. Again, a touch of crime-doesn't-pay moralism
allowed these films to be screened. Psychotic menace
and catastrophic violence became emblems of an increas-
ingly unstable society showing signs of the trauma of the
Depression and the war years.

Despite the ostensible conservatism of the 1950s,
portrayals of violence became more graphic, as if to com-
plement the darkened and uncertain mood in the United
States. During this period the Production Code was stead-
ily weakened by increased public demand for more real-
istic cinema; at the same time, the Hollywood studio
system began to decline due to court challenges to
Hollywood's monopoly practices, the demise of studio
bosses, and the selling off of parts of the system itself.
The circumstances provided a favorable backdrop to films

noir such as Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) and Robert
Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The noir thriller, influ-
enced by the bleak vision of German expressionist cinema,
was filled with acts of sadistic savagery, such as a villain
throwing boiling coffee into a young woman's face in The
Big Heat, or Kiss Me Deadly 's nominal hero slamming a
helpless man's hand repeatedly in a desk drawer as the
camera cuts to the hero's grinning face. Kiss Me Deadly
and Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) also
conclude with massive explosions that recall the A-bomb,
emphasizing the pervasive anxieties of the age.

The 1950s saw a reevaluation of history that became
manifest in the rendering of violence. The westerns of
Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The
Man From Laramie (1955), and Man of the West (1958),
contained often grueling scenes of violence that seem part
of a general assessment of the conventions of the genre, in
particular its function in portraying the hero's hidden
psychological motives and the real underpinnings of the
American expansionist process. The war film also took
part in generic reevaluation, with films such as Aldrich's
Attack! (1959) showing shocking violence (in one scene a
man's arm is crushed by a tank) within narratives that
questioned the military command structure and the rea-
sons for war. To be sure, such films were answered, in a
fashion, by flagwaving fare such as To Hell and Back
(1955), a biopic about Audie Murphy (1924-1971),
the most decorated soldier of World War II, who plays
himself in the film. Films with such conservative agendas
tended to gloss over the effects of violence rather than
show its consequences, or the reasons for warfare and
other violent conflicts in the first place, while also chal-
lenging PCA standards.

THE 1960s AND AFTER

The 1960s brought significant change to the rendering of
film violence long before the US assault on Vietnam
registered in the public mind via the mass media.
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) took the horror film
in a new direction with his portrayal of serial murder, in
particular the film's famous shower scene wherein the
ostensible heroine is stabbed to death, her blood running
down the drain. Three years later, the same director's The
Birds (1963), another venture into the fantastique that
was a fable of the disintegration of small-town life,
pushed the disintegrated PCA further with images of
maddened birds pecking out people's eyes and tearing
their flesh. The film included fairly unprecedented scenes
of violent attacks on children. By the late 1960s, with the
studio system gone, the PCA was replaced by the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA), which produced
a ratings system that assigned a letter to films on their
release to designate their appropriateness for specific

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Violence

ARTHUR PENN

b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27 September 1922

Although his contribution to the depiction of film
violence in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was indeed startling
and groundbreaking, Arthur Penn, like Sam Peckinpah,
should be seen as something other than a filmmaker
preoccupied with bloodshed. Arthur Penn is a skilled
dramatist who, like other innovators in screen violence,
offered moral and other lessons about the prominence of
violence in American life.

Beginning in television directing productions for Phileo
Playhouse and Playhouse 90, Penn moved to Broadway,
winning a Tony for The Miracle Worker (1959), about the
lives of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan, which he
also brought to the screen, earning Oscars® for actresses
Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in 1962. The Miracle Worker
and Alice's Restaurant (1969), Penn's tribute to the 1960s
counterculture, are among his more revered works. Still,
Bonnie and Clyde is no doubt the film most associated with
Penn, for it was a landmark in American cinema. At first,
Bonnie and Clyde was dismissed by critics, who were shocked
by the film's violence, particularly its sudden and very
bloody ending, wherein Clyde (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie
(Faye Dunaway) are ambushed by lawmen as they drive
through the countryside, as well as by the sudden shifts in
tone from violent to comic. Their bodies are jolted
repeatedly by rifle fire as Penn shoots the sequence with
several cameras, the scene recorded with the combination of
slow-motion and rapid editing that Peckinpah would
expand on many times over in The Wild Bunch (1969).

The notoriety of Bonnie and Clyde tends to
overshadow Penn's other accomplishments in the
depiction of film violence. The Chase (1966) is an

uncompromising portrayal of the disintegration of
American life in the 1960s, symbolized by the chaos that
overtakes a small-minded, greedy, bigoted small town in
the Southwest. Toward the film's conclusion, a group of
perfectly middle-class citizens savagely beats the town
sheriff (Marlon Brando) to gain favor with a local land
baron (E. G. Marshall). The film brilliantly portrays the
rage simmering within Middle America, a theme also
explored in Penn's crime film Night Moves (1975). Penn's
first film, The Left-Handed Gun (1958), explores both the
legend of Billy the Kid and the allure of the myth of
banditry. A later western, The Missouri Breaks (1976), is a
scathing portrayal of the American frontier as the site of a
struggle of the poor against the rich and ruthless, with
some jarring moments of violence perpetrated by a
mercenary in the employ of powerful financial interests.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Left-Handed Gun (1958), The Miracle Worker (1962),
Mickey One (1965), The Chase (1966), Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), Alice's Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970),
Night Moves (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976)

FURTHER READING

Carvelti, John G., ed. Focus on "Bonnie and Clyde. "

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
Friedman, Lester D. Bonnie and Clyde. London: British Film

Institute, 2000.
, ed. Arthur Penn 's "Bonnie and Clyde. " Cambridge,

UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Wood, Robin. Arthur Penn. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Christopher Sharrett

audiences: G ("general") for audiences of all ages, PG
("parental guidance") for adults and adolescents, R
("restricted") for adults and young people accompanied
by adults, and X for adults only. The MPAA system
closely mirrored the categories of the Legion of
Decency, although it also allowed greater creative free-
dom to the filmmaker, dropping in-house regulation and
leaving the decision making to the audience.

Accompanying this change were technological
advances that allowed for more graphic images of vio-

lence, including "squibs," explosive charges placed inside
an actor's clothes that can simulate the bloody exit of a
bullet or other projectile. Although crude forms of squibs
had been available for decades, their use had been pro-
scribed by the PCA. By the late 1 960s they were widely
used, most shockingly (at the time) in Arthur Penn's
(b. 1922) Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The film's violent
ending, during which the outlaw couple is ambushed and
shot repeatedly by a Texas Ranger and his posse,
offended audiences of the day, but its portrayal of

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Arthur Penn on the set of Four Friends (1981). EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

violence was closely connected to its sympathy with both
the populist spirit of the Depression (the time period of
its narrative) and the antiauthoritarian Zeitgeist of the late
1960s. The violence of Bonnie and Clyde, taking place in
desiccated versions of John Ford's landscapes, was intri-
cately entangled in the events of the 1960s, especially the
Vietnam War and the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy on November 21, 1963. In the film's ending —
which combines rapid cutting with slow motion — a por-
tion of Clyde's head is blown away to simulate, according
to Penn in various interviews, the shocking murder of
Kennedy as depicted in the infamous home movie taken
by the bystander Abraham Zapruder.

The US incursion into Southeast Asia occurred as
television was reaching its peak as the central medium for
news and entertainment. The Vietnam War was covered
regularly by nightly news programs, bringing graphic
footage of real violence committed against real people
into American living rooms. As the war appeared to the
United States to be lost with the Tet offensive of 1968,
war footage seemed omnipresent. Some newscasts con-
tained footage of outrageous atrocities, such as images of
children running from napalm attacks, which Americans,
many of whom had come of age in the sleepy 1950s,

could hardly comprehend seeing on the previously sani-
tized network television programs. Coverage of the war,
as well as urban protests against the war and attacks by
police on African Americans and others working for civil
rights, brought about a major change in public sensibil-
ity, which was reflected in the violence of late- 1960s
cinema and the films of succeeding decades. At the time,
scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. expressed concern
about a new "pornography of violence" overtaking cul-
ture as universities began a long cycle of empirical
research projects into the effects of media violence on
the public, especially children.

Within two years the violence in Bonnie and Clyde
was far surpassed by that in Sam Peckinpah's (1925—
1984) landmark western The Wild Bunch (1969), about
a gang of aging outlaws looking for a last big score on the
Texas/Mexico border at the outbreak of World War I.
The Wild Bunch was a meditation on scrapped American
ideals that was as significant as Citizen Kane (1941). It is
unfortunate that the violence of The Wild Bunch nearly
obscured the film's dramatic power for many journalistic
reviewers of the day, who frequently commented on
Peckinpah's "blood ballets" rather than the quality of
his narrative. There is no question, however, that The
Wild Bunch was the bloodiest mainstream film the mass
audience had seen to that date and that it was a direct
response to the US intervention in Vietnam. The film
opens and closes with two spectacular massacres that
make full and complex use of the squib to show the
explosive impact of bullets on the human body.
Peckinpah's intention was to remove the frivolousness
from cinematic violence in order to show the conse-
quence of the violent act, whose depiction had been long
suppressed by the Production Code.

During the years of the Vietnam War, various genres
made use of the creative freedom allowed by the new
rating system by using violent images to comment on the
savagery of the war itself and the new culture of violence
that the war had created. George Romero's (b. 1940)
Night of the Living Dead (1969), the first part of a
"zombie tetrology" (concluded in 2005 with Land of
the Dead) that spanned five decades, was a low-budget,
black-and-white horror film that portrayed modern
America as a mob of mindless, flesh-consuming cannibals
who are shot down by an even more mindless mob of
cruel, vengeful enforcers of normality. The horror genre
became a site of increasingly graphic violence in the years
during and immediately after the Vietnam War and the
Watergate scandal (1972-1974). Tobe Hooper's
(b. 1943) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) created
an image of a disintegrating America in which the driving
forces are predation and madness. Similar ideas appeared
in Wes Craven's (b. 1939) Last House on the Left (1972),
which posited the notion that the suburban family is

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Violence

SAM PECKINPAH

b. Fresno, California, 21 February 1925, d. 28 December 1984

Sam Peckinpah is widely regarded as a director who made
significant innovations in the portrayal of violence in
cinema in the 1960s. A volatile alcoholic, Peckinpah was
the archetype of the determined film artist trying to exist
within a commercial system that labeled him I'enfant
terrible. He had a distinguished beginning in television,
cocreating one TV western, The Rifleman (1957—1963),
and creating another, The Westerner (1960). Then began
Peckinpah's extraordinary but troubled career in the
cinema.

Ride the High Country ( 1 962) , only his second western,
is a melancholy meditation on the fading of the American
West's heroes and villains, a topic that was a Peckinpah
obsession. Major Dundee (1965) was Peckinpah's first
attempt to bring to the screen, in the form of a gritty post-
Civil War western, his hard-bitten sense of the violent
world of men. The film made him a Hollywood pariah for
several years. He returned with The Wild Bunch (1969), his
most famous film and his bloodiest. About a gang of aging
outlaws fighting a last stand on the Texas-Mexico border at
the outbreak of World War I, The Wild Bunch made full
use of Peckinpah's interest in a realistic portrayal of screen
violence. Peckinpah photographed battle scenes with
multiple cameras at various speeds; in the final edit, the
film's violent scenes clearly owe a debt to Sergei Eisenstein.
Yet Peckinpah's emphasis on the explosive squib to simulate
a bullet's impact on the body was fairly unprecedented, as
was his sense of the chaos and madness of warfare.

Peckinpah soon became known as "Bloody Sam" and
Hollywood's "master of violence." Perhaps too self-
conscious of the labels, Peckinpah's next major film, Straw
Dogs (1971), seems a strained essay film on masculinity's
inherently violent nature. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(1973) marked his return to the western. Like The Wild
Bunch and The Getaway (1972), Pat Garrett shows

sympathy for the underclass as well as the criminal
outsider, and, like Major Dundee, it was hurt by troubles
with producers and the studio, and by Peckinpah's
increasing personal problems. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo
Garcia (1974) is Peckinpah's gruesome, quasi-surrealist
tribute to one of his influences, Luis Bunuel. Peckinpah's
last major film was Cross of Iron (1977), a World War II
epic about the German retreat from the siege of
Stalingrad, and a compelling meditation on the male
group. While his career may have been compromised by
his lifestyle, Peckinpah brought to the cinema not just new
techniques for the portrayal of violence but also a new
sensibility, one far more conscientious than that of other
directors who have tried to render violence before and after
the Production Code.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The
Balkd of Cable Hogue (1970), Straw Dogs (1971), The
Getaway (1972), Junior Bonner (1972), Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(1974), Cross of Iron (1977), The Osterman Weekend
(1983)

FURTHER READING

Prince, Stephen. Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise
of Ultraviolent Movies. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1998.

, ed. Sam Peckinpah s "The Wild Bunch. " Cambridge,

UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Seydor, Paul. Peckinpah: The Western Pilms — A

Reconsideration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Simmons, Garner. Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1976.
Weddle, David. "If They Move . . . Kill 'Em ": The life and

Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York: Grove Press, 1994.

Christopher Sharrett

every bit as monstrous as the bad men they are taught to
fear in the media. A cycle of "slasher" films, most
famously represented by Friday the 13th (1980),
Halloween (1978), and A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984), continued the horror film's trend of replacing
mythical monsters with psychopathic, vaguely motivated

serial killers who prey on sexually active young people. All
of these films spawned sequels and inspired other, similar
series, finally taking the genre into a downward spiral as it
set aside social commentary to emphasize gore. Where
social commentary remained, its tone became steadily more
conservative as if to jibe with the post- 1960s reaction that

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Violence

Sam Peckinpah. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

culminated in the Reagan era (1981-1989) and the
years following.

The post-Code era brought a number of epic
Hollywood productions whose violence would have been
unthinkable during the studio era, most notably Francis
Ford Coppola's (b. 1939) films about the mafia, The
Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather II
(1974). Both films contain scenes depicting the
machine-gunning of people at close range, garrotings,
stabbings, the exploding of cars (one of which contains
a young woman), and various other forms of bloodlet-
ting. Stanley Kubrick's (1928-1999) A Clockwork Orange
(1971) was viewed during its time as another break-
through in screen violence, but Kubrick's adaptation of
Anthony Burgess's novel about a dystopia overrun by
youth gangs was seen by some critics as bloodless on
various counts, an overly stylized and emotionally icy
view of humanity that is a representative example of the
director's cynicism.

The 1970s and the aftermath of the Vietnam War
and Watergate brought a phase of film violence that
exploited middle-class rage over the collapse of confi-
dence in government and other institutions. Don

Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), William Friedkin's The
French Connection (1971), Michael Winner's Death
Wish (1974), and Phil Karlson's Walking Tall (1973)
endorsed to varying degrees police or civilian vigilantism
again the criminal underworld, which was frequently
associated with the youth counterculture. Dirty Harry
and particularly The French Connection portrayed rather
uncritically the police as dangerous psychopaths who too
often use gun violence to restore civil society. These
portrayals of police violence conveyed a level of cynicism
not seen in US cinema before the 1960s.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1975), loosely
adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from
Underground (1864), offered to post- Vietnam society an
intelligent meditation on violence in America. The film's
tale of a lonely, deranged cab driver (Robert De Niro) —
whose search for identity concludes with a bloody mas-
sacre in a brothel — captured much of the malaise of the
1970s as the American social fabric disintegrated in the
wake of Vietnam even as new waves of reaction
approached. The 1970s also saw the phenomenon of
the disaster film, whose origins can be traced to some
of the early silent epics and films such as San Francisco
(1936). The 1970s disaster films partook of a spectacula-
rization of large-scale destruction that seemed to speak to
the nation's crisis in confidence. The Towering Inferno
(1974) and Earthquake (1974) invited the audience to
enjoy the destruction of middle-class life and of the
nation itself, either in microcosm (the burning of an
immense skyscraper in Towering Inferno) or macrocosm
(the collapse of Los Angeles in Earthquake). These films
featured little outright bloodletting and nothing in the
way of meditations on the nature of violence in the
manner of The Wild Bunch or Taxi Driver. Instead, they
suggested the apocalyptic temperament then prevalent in
mass culture and the film industry that would reappear
by the end of the century in films such as Deep Impact
(1998), Armageddon (1998), and The Day After
Tomorrow (2004). The sensibility of the 1970s disaster
cycle is marked by a feeling of nihilism and despair that
sees no point to political or social reform, preferring
instead the solace of wishful fantasies of self-annihilation.
In their favor, the 1970s disaster films at least offered a
few consolations about the regenerative nature of society.

The 1970s brought a delayed examination of the
Vietnam War in films such as The Deer Hunter (1978)
and Apocalypse Now (1979); the former saw the war in
terms of the wounds to the national psyche while demon-
izing the people of Vietnam, the latter viewed the war as
a gross, horrific spectacle that signaled the end of the
American process of conquest. The war has been revisited
numerous times in films since, most notably in Oliver
Stone's (b. 1946) Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth
of July (1989), films whose graphic violence focused

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Violence

Ernest Borgnine and William Holden in the violent climax of The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969). EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

principally on the wounds suffered by US veterans who
were seduced into service by a deceitful government. But
reactionary retellings of the Vietnam War accompanied
the government of Ronald Reagan. The Rambo films
starring Sylvester Stallone, in particular Rambo II
(1985), took advantage of the "deceived veteran" theme
but also tried, in effect, to rewrite the history of the war.
Not coincidentally, these films and those starring former
bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947) reintro-
duced a cartoonish approach to violence in which blood-
letting had little or no tangible consequence as they
foregrounded the hypermasculinity of barechested, mus-
cular men wielding large machine guns. Schwarzenegger
helped establish a new form of painless, absurd violence
in James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), which
spawned two sequels {Terminator 2: Judgment Day,

1991, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003).
The Terminator films, like many similar movies, took
the portrayal of violence several decades backward as they
invited the audience to enjoy a spectacle of urban
destruction that caused little or no real suffering for the
films' characters, a trend of the latter-day disaster films.

In the reactionary turn of the millennium, the com-
mercial cinema undertook a valorization of military vio-
lence and US involvement in various wars in films such
as The Patriot (2000), We Were Soldiers (2002), Black
Hawk Down (2001), and especially Saving Private Ryan
(1998). Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan makes use
of the graphic bloodshed effects introduced in the 1960s
by Peckinpah and others while diluting or obliterating the
moral lessons of Peckinpah, Penn, and others. The graphic
violence of Saving Private Ryan serves a simpleminded

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celebration of national identity. Unlike the films of
Peckinpah, Saving Private Ryan shows little ambiguity
about the uses of violence; indeed, it celebrates warfare
as a rite of national identity.

Yet the 1990s also saw a reevaluation of screen violence
similar to that undertaken earlier by Penn, Peckinpah, and
others. Actor and director Clint Eastwood (b. 1930), whose
career was established by the violent Italian westerns of
Sergio Leone (1929-1989) such as // Buono, il brutto, il
cattivo {The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966) and by
Dirty Harry (1971) and its sequels, undertook a major
revision of the western in Unforgiven (1993), which tries
to reassert the terrible consequences of violence within a
narrative that questions the mythologizing of the western
genre. Several rather philosophical interrogations of
media violence appeared in the 1990s, most notably
Oliver Stone's ambitious but unfocused Natural Born
Killers (1994), which is distinguished by a Brechtian,
presentational style. While apparently concerned with
the relationship of the media image and film violence
to violence in American society, the film veers into a
reflection on violence within the American character that
makes the film confused and overwhelming.

The postmodern style of the 1990s cinema brought
several "hip" comments on film violence that seem little
more than pastiche exercises, or compilations of various
tropes and conventions from earlier films with little
added critical focus. The most notable maker of these
films is Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963), whose Reservoir
Dogs (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997),
and Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004) made him in the
minds of some critics and audiences the new "master of
violence." His films are alarmingly cynical and empty of
any specific notion either of cinema violence or of vio-
lence in American society, and merely overwhelm the
audience with hyperbolic bloodshed.

The period since the 1980s might be termed the "era
of the bloodbath" in that the new freedom allowed film-
makers has made violent scenes omnipresent, and steadily
more graphic, as directors try to one-up each other in
their uses of onscreen violence. (Tarantino will no doubt
continue to be the representative model for pseudo-
sophisticated uses of violence that reference the films of
the past without their moral or political lessons.) Filmic
violence has become pointless, boring, and rather shame-
less, lacking the moral force and shock effect of films

Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is given treatment to curb his violent tendencies in A Clockwork Orange ( Stanley Kubrick,
1971). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

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Violence

such as The Wild Bunch. While there are exceptions to
this rule, the overall tone of the new Hollywood violence
is one of cynicism and contempt for humanity, perhaps a
reflection of increasing despair as economic conditions
worsen and America loses the respect of other nations in
the new globalized world order.

SEE ALSO Censorship; Disaster Films; Horror Films;
Vietnam War; War Films; Westerns

FURTHER READING

Alloway, Lawrence. Violent America: The Movies, 1946-1964.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

Fraser, John. Violence in the Arts. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating
Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Schneider, Steven. New Hollywood Violence. Manchester, UK:
University of Manchester Press, 2004.

Sharrett, Christopher, ed. Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern
Media. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Slocum, J. David, ed. Violence and American Cinema. New York
and London: Routledge, 2001.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Christopher Sharrett

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WALT DISNEY COMPANY

Though the Walt Disney Company began as an inde-
pendent production company producing cartoons dis-
tributed by other companies, in 2005 the company was
one of the Hollywood majors and the second largest
entertainment conglomerate in the world.

EARLY HISTORY

The history of the Walt Disney Company is bound up
with the history of Walt Disney himself. Disney began
cartooning in Kansas City with a series called Alice's
Wonderland (1923), which included live action and ani-
mation. When he moved to California in 1923, he made
arrangements with a New York company to distribute the
Alice films. (The company considers this as its starting
date.) Since Walt Disney (1901-1966) was a partner
with his brother Roy (b. 1930), the company was origi-
nally called the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio.
However, the name was shortly changed to the Walt
Disney Studio, which had moved to a location on
Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood.

Beginning in 1927, the company developed an all-
animated series called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. After losing
the rights to the character, Walt and his chief animator, Ub
Iwerks (1901-1971), developed Mickey Mouse, the char-
acter that has come to symbolize the company itself.
Mickey was featured in cartoons that utilized synchronized
sound, the first of which was Steamboat Willie, which
opened in New York on 18 November 1928. A long series
of cartoons based on the popular character became the
staple product of the company.

The company also began producing another series to
feature sound and animation innovations. The Silly

Symphonies series included "Flowers and Trees" (1932),
the first full-color cartoon, which won the first Academy
Award® for Best Cartoon that same year. The Disney
studio continued to win the award during the entire
1930s and most years thereafter. Disney also developed
merchandising connected to its cartoon characters, begin-
ning with a $300 license to put Mickey Mouse on writ-
ing tablets in 1929. Other products quickly followed,
including dolls, toys, dishes, and so on, attracting funds
that the company used to produce its innovative and
popular cartoons.

The company expanded into feature-length anima-
tion with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Although there were doubts about the viability of feature
length animated films, the project was an enormous
success, becoming the highest grossing film of all time,
until it was surpassed by Gone With the Wind (1939).
The company continued to produce animated cartoons
and features, including Pinocchio and Fantasia, both
released in 1940. Many technical achievements were
developed by the studio in the process, but the cost of
the films strained the small company's resources, espe-
cially during World War II, when foreign markets were
closed.

During World War II, Disney produced two films in
South America for the US Department of State (Saludos
Amigos [1942] and The Three Caballeros [1944]), as well
as propaganda and training films for the military. After
the war, the company repackaged some of its cartoons
into features (Make Mine Music [1946] and Melody Time
[1948]), as well as developing such live-action films as
Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1949),
both of which included animated segments. Disney's

331

Walt Disney Company

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) was Disney's first feature-lengh animated film. EVERETT

COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

True-Life Adventure series introduced a new style of
nature film, which attracted numerous awards and
accolades.

Disney's first completely live-action film, Treasure
Island, was released in 1950, as was the classic animated
feature Cinderella and the first Disney television show at
Christmas time. After two Christmas specials, Disney
moved further into television with the beginning of the
Disneyland anthology series in 1954. Over the years this
series eventually appeared on all three networks under six
different titles. When The Mickey Mouse Club, one of the
most popular children's series on television, debuted in
1955, it introduced a group of young performers called
Mouseketeers. These television shows promoted Disney
products and developed an outlet for new products.

Another opportunity to promote Disney products was
provided by the creation of Disneyland, a theme park that
opened on 17 July 1955, in Anaheim, California. Featuring
characters and stories from Disney films, the park was
immediately successful and has continuously added new
attractions based on new Disney films.

The Disney Company also finally started its own
distribution company (Buena Vista Distribution) during
the 1950s, having depended until then on other distri-
bution firms to deliver its cartoons and features to thea-
ters. Also during the 1950s, the company released 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea; the first in a series of wacky
comedies, The Shaggy Dog (1954); and a TV series about
the legendary fictional hero, Zorro. The company also
developed Audio-Animatronics, which were introduced
at Disneyland beginning with the Enchanted Tiki Room.
Walt Disney died on 15 December 1966, shortly after
the release of Mary Poppins (1964).

AFTER WALT: THE SIXTIES THROUGH
THE DISNEY DECADE

By the 1960s, the company had developed a diversified
foundation, with the Disney brand firmly established in a
wide range of film products (live action and animation),
as well as television, theme parks, and merchandise. The
Disney firm also benefited from a policy of re-releasing
its popular (already amortized) feature films every few

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Walt Disney Company

years, reaping additional profits with minimal additional
expenditures. For instance, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs wis re-released in 1952, 1958, and 1967, amassing
an additional $50 million.

With some success, Roy Disney, Donn Tatum (pre-
viously, vice president of administration), and Cardon
E. Walker (formerly in marketing) served as the manage-
ment team until 1971. Film releases included The Jungle
Book (1967), Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day
(1968) — the beginnings of a franchise that would
become especially lucrative during the 1990s — and The
Love Bug (1968). Roy Disney saw Walt Disney World in
Orlando, Florida, open in October 1971, but he died a
few months later.

After Roy's death, Tatum moved into the chairman
position and Walker became president. By this time,
however, the company had become even more oriented
to recreation and real estate than entertainment, exem-
plified by the theme park expansion (Tokyo Disneyland
opened on 15 April 1983) and an ambitious plan to
develop a mountain resort in Mineral King, California
(which eventually failed).

Meanwhile, the film division was turning out mainly
box-office duds, which fell far short of previous Disney
successes. Part of the reason may have been the attempt
to cling to the past, attempting to reproduce the classic
Disney films and avoiding the changes that were being
adopted by the rest of the industry. For instance, the
management turned down proposals for Raiders of the
Lost Ark and ET, The Extra- Terrestrial — both films that
became huge box office hits. By the early 1980s, Disney's
share of the box office was less than 4 percent.

Moreover, the company seemed to be moving into
new media outlets at a leisurely pace. By the early 1980s,
much of the film industry had started to adjust to the
introduction of cable and home video as new opportu-
nities for distribution of theatrical motion pictures, plus
opportunities for new investments. The Disney company
made a few moves in this direction, with the launching of
the Disney Channel in April 1983, and an adult-oriented
film label, Touchstone, inaugurated in 1984 with the
release of Splash. However, by the mid-1980s, most
analysts agreed that the company's management was
basically "sitting on its assets," trying to "do what Walt
would have done" and not doing a very good job of it.

Finally in 1984, Disney's uninspired management
was challenged by a group of outside high-profile invest-
ors and eventually lost control of the company. A group
of corporate raiders who recognized the value of the
enterprise started accumulating huge blocks of Disney
stock and jockeying for position to take over the com-
pany. In the end, the billionaire Bass brothers of
Ft. Worth, Texas, invested nearly $500 million in Disney,

preventing a hostile takeover and the possible disman-
tling of the company. Bass Brothers Enterprises ended up
with nearly 25 percent of the Disney stock, enough to
control the company and to appoint their own managers.

The new management team (which dubbed itself
"Team Disney") was led by Michael Eisner (b. 1942),
former head of Paramount, as chief executive officer.
Team Disney also included former Warner Brothers's
vice chairman, Frank Wells, who served as Disney's
president and chief operating officer until his death
in 1994. Jeffrey Katzenberg (b. 1950) (also from
Paramount) became head of the Film Division.

Immediately after the team was put into place, it
proceeded to break a strike at Disneyland and fire 400
Disney employees. Other cost-cutting measures and
strategies were introduced, as discussed below. But the
real evidence of Team Disney's achievements for Disney's
owners is in the value of the company's stock and its
balance sheets. From 1983 to 1987, annual revenues
more than doubled, profits nearly quintupled, and the
value of Disney stock increased from $2 billion to $10
billion; by 1994, it was worth $28 billion. By 1999,
company revenues totaled nearly $23 billion, assets were
over $41 billion, and net income was $1.85 billion.

When the new ownership and management team
took over in 1984, the Disney empire extended its reach
more widely than ever. While drawing on valuable assets
and previous policies, Team Disney also introduced new
strategies that must be understood in the context of the
entertainment business of the 1990s. As with the other
major Hollywood companies, Disney's expansion did not
depend solely on motion pictures, but on a wide array of
business activities in which the new management team
aggressively exploited the Disney brand name, as well as
diversifying outside of the traditional Disney label. Team
Disney rejuvenated the sagging corporation through a
variety of new policies, including reviving the classic
Disney (by repackaging existing products and creating
new animated features), modernizing some Disney char-
acters, implementing rabid cost cutting (especially on
feature films), introducing dramatic price increases at
the theme parks, and employing new technological devel-
opments (such as computer animation).

However, Team Disney also emphasized at least four
other related strategies that the Disney Company had
already developed: corporate partnerships, limited expo-
sure in new investments, diversified expansion, and fur-
ther development of its corporate synergy. Disney not
only added a wide range of corporate activities, but the
company linked these different business endeavors under
the Disney brand (and, more recently, the ABC and
ESPN brands). The management's stated goal was
to identify the most profitable holdings and develop

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Walt Disney Company

synergies across the corporation. So not only was Team
Disney busy diversifying, it became masters at business
cross-fertilization, perhaps the quintessential masters of
synergy. During the early years of the Disney Decade, the
company continued to expand and prosper utilizing these
strategies. In 1991, the company ranked in the top 200
US corporations in terms of sales and assets and was 43rd
in terms of profits. The company's stock was worth $16
billion.

Despite earning $1.1 billion in profits and more
than $10 billion in revenues, as well as becoming the
first film company to gross over $1 billion annually in
domestic box office, a shadow fell over the Magic
Kingdom in 1994. Wells died in a helicopter accident,
Eisner had heart surgery, EuroDisney (which had opened
in 1992) was suffering huge losses, and a proposal for a
new historic theme park was getting hammered by nearly
everyone. It looked like the company was running out of
magic. Then in July 1995, the company stunned Wall
Street and the media with the dramatic $19 billion take-
over of Capital Cities/ABC. The move greatly enhanced
the company's position in television, sports program-
ming, and international marketing, in addition to adding
publishing and multimedia components to its operations.
Thus, Disney became — at least for a short while — the
world's largest media company, with $16.5 billion in
annual revenues.

DISNEY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The Walt Disney Company today is made up of several
divisions: Studio Entertainment, Parks and Resorts,
Consumer Products, and Media Networks. As the com-
pany boasts on its website, "Each segment consists of
integrated, well-connected businesses that operate in con-
cert to maximize exposure and growth worldwide."

Studio Entertainment. The Disney Company creates
a wide range of entertainment products, including ani-
mated and live-action films under the Walt Disney label
(such as The Lion King and The Pirates of the Caribbean),
as well as using the Touchstone, Hollywood, Miramax,
and Dimension labels, which have released a wide variety
of films such as Splash, Pulp Fiction, and Cold Mountain,
Thus, the company distributes adult and foreign films
that are not associated with the family-oriented, PC-rated
Disney brand. The Studio Entertainment division con-
tributed over $8.7 billion of the company's revenues for
2004.

Buena Vista Home Entertainment manages Disney's
home video business and interactive products around the
world. As with its film products, Disney has diversified
its television offerings, producing and distributing a vari-
ety of programming under the ABC, Buena Vista,
Touchstone, and Walt Disney labels. Disney also pro-

duces theatrical versions of successful animated films
through Buena Vista Theatrical Productions and has
become an undeniable presence in Manhattan, not only
by way of its stage productions and the Disney Store in
Times Square, but through extensive real estate holdings,
including the headquarters of ABC.

Audio and musical products offer further opportu-
nities to feature Disney properties and are especially
lucrative for animated features. Buena Vista Music
Group coordinates Disney's various recorded music busi-
nesses, which include Walt Disney Records, Buena Vista
Records, Hollywood Records, and Lyric Street Records,
which make a wide range of audio and music products.

Consumer Products. Not only are Disney's merchan-
dising activities legendary in terms of their historical
precedence, the more recent strategies are remarkable.
The Walt Disney Company is certainly the foremost
merchandising company in Hollywood and produces
or licenses a seemingly endless array of products. The
Consumer Products division contributed over $2.5 billion
of the company's revenues in 2004.

Disney Consumer Products, one of the largest licen-
sors in the world, is divided into Disney Hardlines,
Disney Softlines, and Disney Toys. Disney merchandise
is marketed at retail outlets around the world, its own
outlets at the theme parks, through on-line sites, by way
of the Disney Catalogue, and at Disney Stores world-
wide. The Disney Company also produces a wide range
of printed material, ranging from comic books and child-
ren's magazines to adult-oriented magazines and books.
At the end of 1998, the company maintained that its
print products, which are published in 37 languages and
distributed in more than 100 countries, make it rank
above all other publishers in the world in the area of
children's books and magazines. In addition to publish-
ing under the Hyperion banner (including, ESPN Books,
Talk/Miramax Book, ABC Daytime Press, and Hyperion
East), it publishes the number one children's magazine in
the United States, Disney Adventures. The Consumer
Products division also includes Buena Vista Games,
which turns Disney content into interactive gaming
products, and the Baby Einstein Company, which pro-
duces developmental media for infants.

Parks and Resorts. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts
operates or licenses 10 theme parks on three continents
along with 35 resort hotels, two luxury cruise ships and a
wide variety of other entertainment offerings. The divi-
sion contributed over $7.7 billion of the company's
revenues in 2004.

The Disney empire includes six major theme parks:
Disneyland (including hotels, shopping, dining and
entertainment venues and a new addition, California
Adventure); Walt Disney World Destination Resort

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Walt Disney Company

(including four different theme parks, numerous hotels,
recreational activities and shopping outlets); Tokyo
Disneyland (with Tokyo DisneySea, since 2001);
Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland, which
opened in September 2005.

Disney Regional Entertainment currently operates
eight ESPN Zones, featuring sports-themed dining and
entertainment. The Disney Cruise Line features voyages
from the Florida complex to the Bahamas, with onboard
activities for adults and for families. The company also
was the mastermind of Celebration, the neotraditional
planned community south of Disney World. A number
of sports properties supplement the company's strong
sports media holdings (see below), including the
Mighty Ducks (hockey), as well as extensive sports facili-
ties in Florida.

Media Networks, Through the acquisition of Capital
Cities/ABC in 1995, Disney firmly established its role as
one of the dominant players in the US media industry.
The ABC television network provides abundant oppor-
tunities to promote Disney-produced programming and
other businesses, as well as exploiting the more popular
ABC programs throughout the rest of the Disney empire.
In 2004, the Media Networks division attracted over
$11.7 billion, more than any of the other divisions.

The ABC Television Network includes ABC
Entertainment, ABC Daytime, ABC News, ABC
Sports, ABC Kids, and the Disney-owned production
company, Touchstone Television. In addition, Disney
owns 10 television stations (affiliated with ABC) that
reach approximately 25 percent of the nation's house-
holds, as well as 72 radio stations, including Radio
Disney, ESPN Radio, and ABC News Radio.

Disney's ownership of ESPN is through ABC, which
owns 80 percent of ESPN Inc. in partnership with the
Hearst Corporation. The franchise includes four domes-
tic cable networks, regional syndication, 21 international
networks, radio, Internet, retail, print and location-based
dining, and entertainment. At the end of 1999, the flag-
ship network reached over 77 million subscribers domes-
tically, while ESPN International is said to reach more
than 152 million households in 190 countries. The
ESPN franchise diversified its activities even further, add-
ing ESPN Magazine, ESPN Radio, ESPN Zones (restau-
rant entertainment centers), ESPN Skybox on Disney
Cruise Line ships, and ESPN merchandise. Meanwhile,
ESPN.com is maintained to be the most popular sports
site on the Internet.

Disney's other cable holdings include the Disney
Channel, ABC Family, 37.5 percent of the A&E
Network, 37.5 percent of The History Channel, 50
percent of Lifetime Entertainment Services (including

Lifetime and the Lifetime Movie Network), 39.6 percent
of E! Entertainment Television, Toon Disney (with
recycled Disney programming), and SoapNet (a 24-hour
soap opera channel). The segment also operates Walt
Disney Television Animation and Fox Kids
International, as well as Buena Vista Television and
Buena Vista Television International.

Meanwhile, The Walt Disney Internet Group man-
ages the company's Internet business. The Company's
Internet site, www.disney.com, is consistently rated as
one of the Web's most popular sites, while The Daily
Blast serves as a subscriber-based Website, which includes
various features from Disney-owned enterprises. While
the Walt Disney Company seems to have been plagued
in the early years of the twenty-first century with a series
of highly visible controversies pertaining to executive
compensation, the composition of its Board of Directors,
and Eisner's replacement, the conglomerate still holds
valuable assets that continue to pay dividends. The com-
pany reported revenues of over $30 billion for 2004, with
nearly $4.5 billion income and $1.12 earnings per share.

SEE ALSO Animation; Cartoons; Merchandising; Studio
System

FURTHER READING

Bryman, Alan. Disney and His Worlds. London and New York:
Routledge, 1995.

Fjellman, Steven. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.

Grover, Ron. The Disney Touch. Chicago: Irwin Professional,
1997.

Hiassen, Carl. Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. New
York: Ballantine, 1998.

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and
Commerce of Walt Disney, 3rd ed. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1997.

Shale, Richard. Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studios
During World War II. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press,
1982.

Smoodin, Eric, ed. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic
Kingdom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Taylor, John. Storming the Magic Kingdom. New York: Knopf,
1987.

Telotte, J. P. Disney TV. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2004.

Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy.
Cambridge, UK and Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2001.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the
American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Janet Wasko

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WAR FILMS

War has been a popular topic for motion pictures since
the invention of the medium in the late 1800s. But there
is no single generic type of war film, as the category
encompasses many types of filmed stories about conflict.
The Napoleonic Wars have been the subject of costume
dramas, frontier wars in westerns pit cowboys against
Indians. Star Wars (1977) presents an imaginary interga-
lactic conflict in the realm of science fiction. Other films
make use of war as metaphor: The War of the Roses
(1989) is a screwball comedy about a feuding married
couple, while Used Cars (1980) is a "war" between two
rival car lots. Some onscreen wars are never won: Wile
E. Coyote and the Road Runner are forever locked in
comic conflict in cartoons.

Movies called "war films" do not reflect one attitude
or a single purpose. They may be antiwar {All Quiet on
the Western Front, 1930) or pro-war (Bataan, 1943). How
I Won the War (1967) is a satiric and mocking comedy
about World War I, but The Big Parade (1925) tells a
tragic story about the toll its events take on one man's
personal life. The Green Berets (1968) is a gung-ho cele-
bration of the US Special Forces and their role in
Vietnam, but Platoon (1986) presents the soldier's life
there as an almost insane universe.

The popularity of the war film and of war as a topic
in movies is borne out by two factors: artistic recognition
as reflected in Academy Awards® for Best Picture, and
box-office returns. War films that have won Best Picture
Oscars® include Wings (1927), the very first such winner;
All Quiet on the Western Front; Patton (1970), a bio-
graphical portrait of World War II general George
S. Patton; The Deer Hunter (1978), a stark look at the
lives of young steelworkers before, during, and after their

combat in Vietnam; and Platoon, combat veteran Oliver
Stone's (b. 1946) first-person account of the infantry in
Vietnam. Other Oscar® winners whose stories involve
war include Gone with the Wind (1939), From Here to
Eternity (1953), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957),
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Braveheart (1995), Mrs.
Miniver (1942), Casablanca (1942), The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946), and Schindler's List (1993). Because
they are based in reality and frequently star big-name
actors and contain scenes of exciting action, war movies,
both pro- and and-, have a strong record of success at the
box office. Among the many top-grossing films, as evi-
denced by records reported in the The Motion Picture
Herald, Motion Picture Daily, and Film Daily, are Hell's
Angels (1930), Sergeant York (1941), Air Force (1943), So
Proudly We Hail! (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943),
Battleground (1949), Operation Pacific (1951), Battle
Cry (1955), The Longest Day (1962), Tora! Tora! Toral
(1970), Midway (1976), Saving Private Ryan (1998),
Three Kings (1999), and Pearl Harbor (2001).

DEFINING THE WAR FILM

Coming up with a generic definition of the war film
presents problems. Sometimes movies are labeled "war
films" even when they are not set in combat. Since You
Went Away (1944), the story of the American home front
in 1944, is not about fighting battles with weapons but
fighting the daily battle of morale for those whose lives
are indirectly affected. Similarly, The Best Years of Our
Lives is about the return to civilian life of three soldiers
from different economic backgrounds and the difficult
adjustments they must make. Yet the basis of the story is
the combat stress they experienced and the impact it had

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on them mentally and physically. Coming Home (1978),
set largely outside of combat, is nevertheless a movie
about the Vietnam War. War can also be presented as a
metaphor (War of the Buttons, 1994, in which children's
playtime quarrels escalate) or as a computerized challenge
(War Games, 1983).

To define the war film, it is thus necessary to estab-
lish parameters, the first of which is to separate fact
(documentaries and newsreels) from fiction (created sto-
ries, even if based in fact), and to determine how much
fighting must appear on screen to constitute designating
a movie a war film. Some movies have war as a significant
background but do not depict any combat. Some have
combat sequences as an episode in the larger story, like
Gone with the Wind, which begins in the peaceful Old
South, moves forward into and through the Civil War,
and goes on to the Reconstruction period and postwar
problems. For this reason, Gone with the Wind, a major
film about the Civil War, is seldom labeled simply as a
war film.

The war film as a genre is best defined as a movie in
which a fictionalized or fact-based story is told about an
actual historical war. Fighting that war, planning it, and
undergoing combat within it should fill the major por-
tion of the running time. This would include biographies
of combatants, such as the World War II hero Audie
Murphy (1924-1971) (To Hell and Back, 1955), and
movies set inside combat but which remove their char-
acters from the conflict through visualized flashbacks
(Beach Red, 1967). This definition eliminates the home
setting, the war as background or single episode movie,
the military camp film, the training camp movie, and the
biography that does not contain actual combat.

The purpose of the war film made by commercial
enterprises is primarily to entertain. A film made during
the war itself, such as the 1943 Guadalcanal Diary, has
additional goals: to lift morale, to help civilians under-
stand what their fighting men are going through, to
provide information, and to involve the audience in
positive support for the war that might perhaps influence
an outcome still in doubt. A war movie made after the
strife has ended needs to find other purposes, and unlike
movies made during the fighting, needs to justify its
morality. Once the war movie becomes a familiar genre,
as in the World War II combat film, it is a story the
audience knows and accepts. Such war stories can then be
used to address other issues of national concern. For
instance, in 1940 and 1941 two movies about World
War I, The Fighting 69th and Sergeant York, were like
recruiting posters for the European war that was on
America's horizon. In 1949, a time of racial strife in
America, Home of the Brave told the story of a black
soldier who goes to pieces during World War II combat

in the South Pacific because of racial prejudice aimed at
him personally. He is brought back from his mission in a
state of shock and paralysis, and the technique of narco-
synthesis is used to draw his story out through flashbacks.
In 1996, when the role of women in combat was in the
news, Courage Under Fire, starring Meg Ryan, was a
successful movie about a female captain nominated for
the Medal of Honor. During the war in Vietnam, and the
controversy surrounding America's involvement, stories
about World War II were created that reflected a loss of
faith in the government. Such movies as The Dirty Dozen
(1967) and Play Dirty (1968) presented America's
involvement in World War II as an ugly process of cheat-
ing, with criminals or criminal minds fighting the war by
violating the rules of the Geneva Convention.

After the combat genre was established, movies
appeared with comic tones that would have been inap-
propriate during the war itself. What Did You Do in the
War, Daddy? (1966) and Operation Petticoat (1959) were
successful comedies set in World War II, the first in the
Italian campaign and the second in a submarine in the
South Pacific. M*A*S*H (1970) was a harsh comedy
about Korea, set in a mobile surgical hospital unit; the
television sitcom McHale's Navy treated the PT-boat war
in the Pacific as a lark; and Hogan's Heroes, also a tele-
vision series, made fun of life in a prisoner-of-war camp
in Germany.

HISTORY

As soon as cameras could take moving pictures of com-
bat, war became a popular subject for narrative movies.
Although no one can be certain of the exact "first" war
movie, many historians feel it is probably a one-and-a-
half-minute pro-war film, Tearing Down the Spanish
Flag, made on a set in New York City immediately after
the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898.
The precedent was set. All the wars in American history
have had stories told about them by Hollywood,
although some wars are more popular than others. A
relatively small number are based on the Revolutionary
War, among them The Patriot (2000), staring Mel
Gibson, and Revolution (1985), starring Al Pacino. The
Civil War was a popular topic in silent film days, but
because "the enemy is us," it has become a war used to
tell stories about family conflicts ("brother against
brother"), racial issues, or romances. Successful Civil
War movies include The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone
with the Wind, The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The
Horse Soldiers (1959), and Glory (1989).

World War I inspired such successful films as The
Big Parade (1925), What Price Glory (made in 1926 and
remade in 1952), Lilac Time (1928), Wings, Hell's Angels,

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SAMUEL FULLER
b. Worcester, Massachusetts, 12 August 1912, d. 30 October 1997

Samuel Fuller is a key figure in the history of the American
war film because his movies are shaped by his own
experience in combat. Fuller became a crime reporter by
the age of seventeen and moved to Hollywood to begin
writing screenplays in 1936. He joined the army after
World War II broke out, serving in the Sixteenth
Regiment of the First Army Division ("the Big Red
One"), receiving the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the
Purple Heart. Fuller fought the full European war, from
the African campaigns on through Sicily and Anzio to,
ultimately, landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day. His
combat experience became the seminal event of his life.
No matter what settings his films take, they are all in some
way about war. In Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965),
Fuller, appearing as himself, states his credo: "Film is like
a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death."
Although other directors, such as Oliver Stone, have been
in combat, it is fair to say that no other movie director
served as long in the trenches as Fuller.

Fuller's war movies cover World War II (Merrill's
Marauders, 1962; the autobiographical The Big Red One,
1980), the Korean conflict {The Steel Helmet, 1951; Fixed
Bayonets, 1951), the Cold War (Pickup on South Street,
1953; Hell and High Water, 1954), and an early
presentation of the problems in Vietnam, concerning the
French colonials versus the Viet-Minh rebels (China Gate,
1957). He also made Verboten (1959, set in postwar
Germany); House of Bamboo (1955), about a gang of
ex-Army men who organize their criminality along
military lines; and a story of the native American "wars,"
Run of the Arrow (1957). Only Merrill's Marauders (1962)
is based on a true story, that of Brigadier General Frank D.
Merrill, who commanded the first American infantrymen

to fight in Asia, the 5437th Composite Group, who were
trained as guerrillas to fight deep behind Japanese lines in
Burma.

Fuller's war movies are presented in a distinctive
visual style that may be described as combative, to the
extent that they break cinematic rules. He shifts from
rapid montages to lengthy camera movements, from close-
ups to long shots, from real locations to rear projections,
and from objective to subjective points-of-view without
first clearly establishing the original position. Perhaps the
definitive statement regarding war movies was made by
Fuller: "The only way you could . . . really let the audience
feel what it's like is to fire live ammo over the heads of the
people in the audience."

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

/ Shot Jesse James (1949), The Steel Helmet (1951), Fixed
Bayonets! (1951), Pickup on South Street (1953), House of
Bamboo (1955), Run of the Arrow (1957), China Gate
(1957), Forty Guns (1957), Verboten! (1959), Merrill's
Marauders (1962), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss
(1964), The Big Red One (1980), White Dog (1982)

FURTHER READING

Fuller, Samuel. The Big Red One. New York: Bantam, 1980.
Fuller, Samuel, with Christa Lang Fuller and Jerome Henry

Rudes. A Third Eye: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and

Filmmaking. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Garnham, Nicholas. Samuel Fuller. New York: Viking/

London: British Film Institute, 1971.
Hardy, Phil. Sam Fuller. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Server, Lee. Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground: A Critical

Study with Interviews, a Filmography and a Bibliography.

Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 1994.

Jeanine Basinger

All Quiet on the Western Front, The Fighting 69th, Dawn
Patrol (made in both 1930 and 1938), and Sergeant York.
Although the World War I movie tended to be less
popular after World War II, there are such later films
as Lafayette Escadrille (1958), Paths of Glory (1957) and
The Blue Max (1966). World War II has been the most
frequently depicted conflict in American cinema and is
discussed in more depth below.

Stories of the Korean War include The Steel Helmet
(1951), Fixed Bayonets! (1951), The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(1955), and M*A*S*H. Vietnam movies, apart from The
Green Berets, were seldom made during the war itself.
Early examples include The Boys in Company C (1978),
Go Tell the Spartans (1978), and two highly respected
and influential films, The Deer Hunter (1978) and
Apocalypse Now (1979). Other Vietnam films are

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War Films

Samuel Fuller. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

Platoon, Full Metal Jacket (1987), and We Were Soldiers
(2002). War movies have been set in Grenada
{Heartbreak Ridge, 1986), the Persian Gulf {Three
Kings; Jarhead, 2005), and Nigeria {Tears of the Sun,
2003). A new war, the war of terrorism, has emerged in
noncombat movies such as the Die Hard series with
Bruce Willis (1988, 1990, and 1995), in which terrorist
groups threaten various American settings. The terrorist
movie first appeared in the 1970s with the French-Italian
film, Nada (1974), in which left-wing terrorists kidnap
the American ambassador to France, and Rosebud (1975),
a story about Arab terrorists kidnapping a yacht to hold
five wealthy young women as political hostages.

The popularity of the war movie has not diminished
since the turn of the twenty-first century. In 2000 a
World War II submarine movie was released {U-571),
and a Vietnam-era training camp movie, Tigerland,
earned critical respect. The year 2001 brought Enemy at
the Gates, about war-torn Stalingrad in 1942, Captain
Corelli's Mandolin, set on a Greek island in World War I,
and a successful television miniseries based on fact, Band
of Brothers. Two movies about combat were huge box-
office hits in 2001: Pearl Harbor, which once again
recreated the events of 7 December 1941, and Black
Hawk Down, based on the true story of the US Army

Rangers and Delta Force soldiers sent to Somalia in 1993
to capture a local warlord's top lieutenants.

Certain directors have been associated with movies
about war, among them John Ford (1894-1973), who
served in the Navy, as well as George Stevens (1904-
1975), John Huston (1906-1987), and William Wyler
(1902-1981), all of whom made documentaries under
combat circumstances while serving in the Signal Corps
in World War II. Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) and Oliver
Stone both experienced actual combat and have written,
directed, and produced war films. Fuller fought in World
War II in the infantry, and Stone did the same during
Vietnam. Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) is about his
own combat experience in World War II, and Stone's
Platoon won the Best Picture Oscar® in 1986. Other
directors associated with the genre today include Steven
Spielberg (b. 1946), who not only made the very popular
Saving Private Ryan but also Empire of the Sun (1987),
about a young boy's prisoner-of-war experience when
Japan invades China, and Band of Brothers.

Stars whose images define the American wartime
military presence include John Wayne (1907-1979),
Henry Fonda (1905-1982), Robert Mitchum (1917-
1997), and Dana Andrews (1909-1992), all of whom are
associated with successful combat movies. Contemporary
actors who have portrayed military men include Tom
Hanks, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, and
Sylvester Stallone, who portrayed an ex-Green Beret in the
Rambo movies (1982, 1985, and 1988), none of which
actually took place during the Vietnam War.

THE WORLD WAR II COMBAT FILM

As mentioned above, the most frequently depicted war in
Hollywood films is World War II, and the most popular
form of the World War II war movie has been the
combat film. This subgenre became so popular that it
in turn influenced ways of telling stories in westerns,
science fiction, and other generic "wars." Important titles
include Ford's They Were Expendable (1945), with John
Wayne; Wyler's Battleground (1949); The Longest Day, an
epic recreation of D-Day; Fuller's The Big Red One; and
Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, a movie that inspired a
new spate of World War II movies.

The primary characteristics now associated with the
combat-film genre derive from the film Bataan, released
in June 1943, a little more than a year after the peninsula
fell to the Japanese. Its reviews were uniformly excellent
and its box office was solid. The historical model for the
film's characters and action was the 1934 Ford film, The
Lost Patrol, written by Dudley Nichols. Bataan tells the
story of a group of hastily assembled volunteers who,
through their bravery and tenacity, hold off an

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overwhelmingly large group of the enemy long enough to
buy much-needed time for American forces. Because all
die at the end, it is an example of "the last stand"
celebration of American bravery, the most familiar
mythic example of which is the story of the Alamo.

Many World War II combat films contain the story
elements found in Bataan: a group that is a democratic
ethnic and religious mixture; a hero who is part of the
group, but who is forced to separate himself in order to
be a good leader; a specific objective to be met; a specific
enemy; and recognized military equipment and costume.
The basic narrative conventions of hero, group, and
objective of the World War II combat genre can be
traced from films released from the 1940s onward, dec-
ade by decade. In the 1950s such films as Halls of
Montezuma (1950), Battle Cry (1955), and Men in War
(1957) continued the tradition. Even though Halls of
Montezuma and Battle Cry are set in World War II and
Men in War in Korea, all three retain the basic story in
which a diverse group of soldiers are on patrol under
stern leadership, seeking to achieve their objective while
fighting a difficult enemy. Similar films from the 1960s
include Marines, Let's Go (1961), Merrill's Marauders
(1962), Up from the Beach (1965), and the Vietnam-
based The Green Berets. The 1970s brought Kelly's
Heroes (1970) and The Boys in Company C, the 1980s
The Big Red One and Heartbreak Ridge; and the 1990s A
Midnight Clear (1992) and Saving Private Ryan, which,
although it was hailed as a "new" and "different" World
War II combat film, followed the generic convention in
many ways. The visual presentation is more graphic and
realistic, but the narrative is the familiar story of a tough
hero (Tom Hanks) who has to separate himself from his
men in order to be an effective leader. His group is
diverse, including an Italian, a Jew, a cynic from
Brooklyn, and a mountain sharpshooter. Their difficult
objective is to rescue a single soldier, the only brother of
four not yet killed in combat, as a symbolic mission. The
new millennium has continued to bring war films based
on the original format, such as Windtalkers and We Were
Soldiers (both 2002) and Tears of the Sun (2003).

Once the conventions of the combat film were set,
they were used for many wars, such as Korea {Men in
War), Vietnam (The Green Berets, The Boys in Company
C ), Grenada [Heartbreak Ridge), an imaginary future war
on American soil {Red Dawn), the Persian Gulf {Three
Kings), and Somalia {Black Hawk Down). Although the
purpose of the combat film is not the same in 1998 as in
1943, its conventions still serve a purpose. Each of the
postwar combat films reflects the decade in which it was
released. Saving Private Ryan, for example, modernized
the genre with new technology and increased violence,
and put the older elements together to challenge movie-
goers to think about the increased use of violence as well

as to consider seriously the sacrifices combat soldiers
made for Americans during World War II.

PROPAGANDA

The United States, with a guaranteed freedom of the
press, has provided its citizens access to information as
a right of the democratic process. The idea of "propa-
ganda" is linked to totalitarian governments, with an
attendant suspicion of inaccurate, slanted information.
Therefore, when the United States became involved in
two world wars, it faced the issue of how to mobilize its
populace, provide accurate information, and influence
morale without violating the basic tenets of democracy.
The movie business became an important force in this
process. After America declared war against Germany on
6 April 1917, the Committee on Public Information was
formed, headed by the liberal journalist George Creel.
The Committee organized a campaign to stimulate
nationalism through patriotic speeches, recruiting post-
ers, and pamphlets, but more significantly by using
motion pictures, resulting in such strongly anti-German
movies as The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918) and My
Pour Years in Germany (1918). Successful directors
created movies that also supported the war, including
D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) with Hearts of the World
(1918), part of which was actually shot on Europe's
battlefields, and Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) with
The Little American (1917), starring the very popular
Mary Pickford.

When World War II began in Europe on 1
September 1939, both Russia and Germany had estab-
lished film propaganda machines. Vladimir Lenin, the
first head of the Soviet government after the Russian
Revolution of 1917, said, "of all the arts, the most
important for us is the cinema"; he understood that
movies could help spread the goals of the revolution to
rural areas and provide visual information for illiterate
peasants. He created a nationalized Soviet film industry,
and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
made great films that were also effective propaganda:
Bronenosets Potyomkin {Battleship Potemkin, also known
as Potemkin, 1925) and Oktyabr {October and Ten Days
that Shook the World, 1927). Nazi Germany marshaled
an effective system of selling Hitler's ideas under the
leadership of Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), with the
talented Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) as one of the chief
directors. Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens {Triumph of
the Will, 1935), the official record of the Nazi Party
Congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia (1938), her pre-
sentation of the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, stand
today as preeminent examples of propaganda. Italy,
Japan and Great Britain also had experience in using

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movies to influence their people and to popularize their
political ideas.

The United States, however, found itself the only
country without an established agency for such purposes.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945), who
understood the importance of the media in politics,
began the process of creating an official "propaganda"
agency for America in late 1939. After various commit-
tees were formed and disbanded between 1939 and 1941,
the bombing of Pearl Harbor clarified the need for a
single entity to direct American propaganda. Roosevelt
appointed Lowell Mellett, a former journalist, to coordi-
nate government films, to establish a working relation-
ship with Hollywood, and to make sure that the studios
cooperated with the war effort. Roosevelt's executive
order establishing this group, which would become the
Office of War Information (OWI), clearly stated that
movies would be one of the most important avenues with
which "to inform" the public about the war. In April
1942 Mellett set up his Hollywood office, which was
placed under the Domestic Branch of the OWI. The

OWI provided Hollywood with a list of seven questions
with which to review all films made during the war:

1) Will this picture help win the war?

2) What war information problem does it seek to
clarify, dramatize, or interpret?

3) If it is an "escape" picture, will it harm the war effort
by creating a false picture of America, her allies, or
the world we live in?

4) Does it merely use the war as the basis for a
profitable picture, contributing nothing of real
significance to the war effort and possibly lessening
the effect of other pictures of more importance?

5) Does it contribute something new to our
understanding of the world conflict and the various
forces involved, or has the subject already been
adequately covered?

6) When the picture reaches its maximum circulation
on the screen, will it reflect conditions as they are

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

343

War Films

JOHN WAYNE

b. Marion Michael Morrison, Winterset, Iowa, 26 May 1907, d. 11 June 1979

John Wayne's long and successful movie career earned him
legendary status. He became an internationally recognized
American icon, representing the strong, silent hero who lived
by the virtues of bravery, commitment to traditions, respect
for women and children, and a deep patriotism. Wayne was
most commonly associated with the western genre, beginning
with The Big Trail (1930), his first starring role, to his final
movie, The Shootist (1976). More than any other film star,
Wayne came to represent the concept of "American."

Wayne is the undisputed Hollywood movie box-
office champion, having been ranked in the top-ten most
popular stars for over two consecutive decades, a record
that has never been equaled. A popular joke is that the
United States didn't win World War II — John Wayne did.
However, Wayne made only five movies between 1942
and 1945: Reunion in France, Flying Tigers (both 1942),
The Fighting Seabees (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), and,
in his most important combat role of the era, as a PT-boat
officer in John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945).

Wayne's association with war movies increased after
World War II ended, in both postwar combat films and
cavalry westerns directed by Ford: Fort Apache (1948), She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950).
Wayne also played a Civil War cavalry officer in The Horse
Soldiers (1959), General Sherman in an episode of How the
West Was Won (1962), and Davy Crockett in The Alamo
(1960), a film he also produced and directed. Wayne's
later World War II combat movies began with Sands of
Iwo Jima (1949), for which he was nominated for an
Academy Award® as Best Actor. His creation of Sergeant
Stryker, a man who "has the regulations tattooed on his
back," became the model for the postwar tough-guy top

sergeant of World War II, a loner who puts duty before
personal life and who, as a result, is misunderstood by his
men.

Although Wayne made more westerns than war
movies, Sands of Iwo Jima solidified his association with
World War II. All his World War II movies were box-
office hits: Operation Pacific (1951), Flying Leathernecks
(1965), The Longest Day (1962), and In Harm's Way
(1965). His least successful and most controversial war
film was The Green Berets, a 1968 pro-Vietnam film
which, like The Alamo, he starred in, produced, and
directed.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Stagecoach (1939), Flying Tigers (1942), They Were

Expendable (1945), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon (1949), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Operation
Pacific (1951), Flying Leathernecks (1951), The Horse
Soldiers (1959), The Longest Day (1962), The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance (1962), In Harm's Way (1965), The
Green Berets (1968), True Grit (1969)

FURTHER READING

Davis, Ronald L. The Life and Image of John Wayne. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Levy, Emanuel. John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of

Life. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988.
Roberts, Randy, and James S. Olson. John Wayne: American.

New York: Free Press, 1995.
Wayne, Pilar. John Wayne: My Life with Duke. New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1987.
Wills, Garry. John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Jeanine Basinger

and fill a need current at that time, or will it be
outdated?

7) Does the picture tell the truth or will the young
people of today have reason to say they were misled
by propaganda?

The most discussed of the questions became the famous
"number seven," which touched on the heart of the
propaganda issue for a democratic nation. The guidelines

stated that any movie, whether it was directly about the
conflict or not, would be significant to the war effort.
The OWI enlisted the famed director Frank Capra
(1897-1991) to direct or supervise a series of movies
called Why We Fight (1943-1945). First as an army
major, but promoted later to colonel, Capra worked
under the aegis of the Special Services Branch and the
Army Pictorial Service at the 834th Photo Signal
Detachment.

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SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

War Films

John Wayne in Jet Pilot (Josef von Sternberg, 1957).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Other famous war documentaries made by Hollywood
directors were Huston's Report from the Aleutians (1943)
and The Battle of San Pietro (1945), Wyler's The Memphis
Belle (1944), and Walt Disney's Victory Through Air Power
(1943). Two influential documentaries were made by John
Ford: The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th
(1943). The Battle of Midway was the first documentary
of World War II to find wide release and popular response.
It was an accident of fate that Ford, a commander in the
Navy, was on Midway the day the Japanese attacked. He
ran out, placed three 16mm cameras in the sands, and shot
as much footage as he could. Two of the cameras were
destroyed and Ford was wounded, but the resulting film
showed Americans what it looked like to be in the midst of
the chaos of combat. December 7th, photographed by
Gregg Toland (1904-1948), the legendary cinematogra-
pher of Citizen Kane (1941), is a classic example of the
blurring of filmed fact and fiction. On the day that Pearl
Harbor was bombed, few cameras were available to cover
the events. The scenes many people today believe to be
photographs of soldiers and sailors engaging the enemy
were, in fact, scenes with actors, staged inside a studio.
The National Audio Visual Center's booklet on World
War II documentaries comments:

The film represents one of the rare instances
where moments of illusion have become, for
most of us, the documentary reality. However,
because the fact and fiction of December 7th are
blended together so skillfully, its impact is not
seriously diminished. On the contrary, the film
stands as an almost textbook example of the use
of a succession of edited images to involve and
overwhelm an audience.

TECHNOLOGY

The development of sound, color, and the widescreen
process changed the look of war on the screen, increasing
the opportunity for Hollywood filmmakers to work on a
wider canvas with greater realism. Adding the sounds of
guns firing, the sight of red blood flowing, and a complex
spatial continuity increased the war film's power to startle
and emotionally engage the audience. Changing morality
loosened censorship restrictions, so that using these new
developments for an increase in gore, horror, and the
depiction of death and dismemberment was acceptable.

The presentation of war movies was also influenced
by moving images seen in newsreels and on television.
This history of "reality" as an influence can be traced
back to the late 1890s. According to the film historian
Raymond Fielding, both the Spanish-American and Boer
Wars were covered by film. One of the first military
conflicts to be recorded on film, the Boer War in South
Africa attracted motion picture cameramen from many
countries following its outbreak in 1899. Fielding also
points out that the footage of the 1898 Spanish-
American War was a mixture of authentic and staged
footage. Newsreels provided photographic news coverage
well in advance of newspapers and magazines. For
instance, the Mexican Revolution in 1914 was well cov-
ered by moving picture cameras, and Pancho Villa
(1878-1923), the revolutionary leader, was signed to an
exclusive contract by Mutual Films. Early news coverage,
however, was tainted partly by the "recreation" of major
events that were sold as real. One such early recreation is
the 1897 "miniaturized" Battle of Manila Bay (1898), by
J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. Other famous
reenactments include one on the assassination of
President William McKinley (1843-1901), the sinking
of the battleship Maine, the coronation of Edward VII,
and the trial of Alfred Dreyfus.

Because of censorship rules and the unwillingness of
military personnel to allow civilian cameramen onto the
front lines, photographic coverage of World War I for
newsreels was done largely by the US Signal Corps.
Long-focus lenses were used, and the technical innova-
tion of handheld cameras that did not require heavy
tripods facilitated their shooting. During World War II

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

345

War Films

coverage increased dramatically, although newsreels of
the war were sent to Washington for review before release
into theaters, largely because of military sensitivity
regarding the sight of casualties or dead bodies by the
civilian audience.

World War II brought an increased ability to process
footage rapidly. This meant that World War II was the
first war in which noncombatants could see the events
soon after they occurred. Weekly newsreels that pre-
sented portions of the extensive footage shot in combat
were part of every theater's regular programming during
the war. There were also full-length documentaries made
by the film units of the Signal Corps. The United States
spent more than $50 million annually to obtain filmed
coverage of World War II. By the time of the war in
Vietnam, the development of lightweight television cam-
eras and videotape allowed TV reporters to provide
nightly coverage on the home screens of Americans.

Technology, whether for early newsreels, documen-
taries, or television, influences the fictionalized presenta-
tion of war movies in three ways: audiences develop
expectations regarding the physical look of combat and
narratives about war; filmmakers, having this same view-
ing experience, attempt to recreate the look or even
include some of the footage inside their narratives; and
when the filmmakers who shot the real footage in the
field return to civilian life, they often bring their expertise
to fiction films.

Presently, the main technological developments that
influence war movies are digital. Computer-generated
images allow filmmakers to create detailed and elaborate
combat images at relatively low cost, and to provide new
perspectives on events. Pearl Harbor, for example,
showed the bombing of the U.S.S. Arizona both from
above (riding a bomb directly into the hit) and below
(going underwater to see the struggles of drowning men).
As these processes are further developed and new tech-
nologies invented, the look of the war film will evolve
accordingly, whether in terms of realism or stylized "bul-
let time" imagery.

SEE ALSO Action and Adventure Films; Genre;

Propaganda; Vietnam War; Violence; World War I;
World War II

FURTHER READING

Adair, Gilbert. Hollywood's Vietnam: From "The Green Berets" to
"Full Metal Jacket." London: William Heinemann, 1989.

Anderegg, Michael, ed. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and
Television. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a
Genre. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Dick, Bernard F. The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World
War II Film. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American

Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993.

Eberwein, Robert, ed. The War Film. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel, 191 1-1967.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972.

Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes
to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped
World War II Movies. New York: Free Press, 1987.

MacCann, Richard Dyer. The People's Films: A Political History of
U.S. Government Motion Pictures. New York: Hastings House,
1973.

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen
to 1907. New York: Scribners, 1990.

Schindler, Colin. Hollywood Goes to War: Films and American
Society, 1939-1952. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1979.

Shale, Richard. Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studios
During World War II. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press,
1982.

Suid, Lawrence. Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies.
Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1978.

Wood, Richard, ed. Film and Propaganda in America: A
Documentary History. Vol. 1: World War I. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1990.

Jeanine Basinger

346

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

WARNER BROS.

Since its emergence as a major Hollywood studio in the
late 1920s, Warner Bros, has remained at the forefront of
the American film industry, proving itself time and again
as the boldest innovator among the studios. Warner
coalesced as an integrated major studio on the basis of
its pioneering role in the coming of "talkies," quickly
developing under Harry (1881-1958) and Jack Warner
(1892-1978) into a competitive industry force with per-
haps the most distinctive house style in Hollywood. After
struggling through the early postwar era, Warner Bros,
again played a pioneering role when, in the mid-1950s, it
led major studios into television series production, which
quickly proved to be a more reliable and profitable
endeavor than movie production. Once the most factory-
oriented of the integrated majors, Warner Bros, even-
tually came to terms with independent production, and
in fact it was a major proponent of the director-
driven American New Wave of the late 1960s and early
1970s.

That movement was soon overwhelmed by the New
Hollywood, with its media conglomerates, blockbuster
films, and entertainment franchises. Here too Warner
Bros, helped shape and define a changing industry —
albeit as a subdivision of two successive corporate jugger-
nauts. The first of these parent companies was Warner
Communications Inc., which became an American enter-
tainment giant during the 1970s under Steve Ross, and
continued to expand in the 1980s despite huge losses
incurred by its ground-breaking video-game division,
Atari. The second was Time Warner, Inc., whose crea-
tion via merger in 1989 spurred a new era of global
media conglomerates. The Warner Bros, film studio
was a key component of the vast Time Warner empire,

even after the 1996 acquisition of Turner Broadcasting,
which added extensive broadcast and cable assets, the
world's largest media library, and three additional film
companies (including New Line) to the mix.

In the twenty-first century the pioneering impulse
led to disaster, with the hugely unsuccessful merger of
Time Warner with the Internet giant America Online
(AOL). Time Warner and its myriad media divisions
survived, however, thanks largely to a new breed of global
entertainment franchise launched by The Matrix movies
(1999-2003), the Harry Potter series (2001-2005), and
The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). Meanwhile,
other subsidiaries, notably cable movie channels HBO
and TCM (Turner Classic Movies), have exploited the
vast Time Warner library and kept the Warner Bros,
trademark and its movies in continuous circulation.
Thus Warner Bros., as a studio and a movie-industry
brand, remains enormously successful more than eighty
years after its birth.

GENESIS AND RAPID GROWTH

The genesis of the Warner movie empire actually began
in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the three older Warner
brothers, Harry, Albert (Abe), and Sam, all still in their
twenties, went into the nickelodeon business around
1903. (Jack, born in 1892, sang during intermissions
and reel changes.) Like many early exhibitors, they soon
moved into distribution to ensure a flow of product, only
to tangle with the Motion Picture Patents Company.
They persisted, however, and eventually reached a water-
shed of sorts in 1918 with the release of My Four Years in
Germany, a semi-documentary that became an enormous

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

347

Warner Bros.

box-office success and enabled the Warners to move into
production with a modest operation on Sunset Boulevard
in Hollywood. Continued growth accelerated in 1923,
when the Warner Brothers West Coast Studio was incor-
porated as Warner Bros., and operations were expanded
substantially. Warner Bros, released fourteen films that
year, including Where the North Begins, which launched
its successful series featuring the dog Rin Tin Tin. The
studio produced several notable films in the next few
years — including Ernst Lubitsch's (1892-1947) The
Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windermere's Fan
(1925) — but its most significant efforts involved not film
production but film technology as it pioneered the devel-
opment of "talking pictures."

The impulse behind Warner Bros.' early experimen-
tation with sound, which was the brainchild of Sam
Warner, was not dialogue but music. The Warners hoped
to bring full orchestral accompaniment to all of their
releases, including those in smaller, subsequent-run thea-
ters that could not afford an orchestra. In 1925 Warner
Bros, acquired the Vitagraph studio (in New York) and, a
year later, founded Vitaphone in a partnership with
Western Electric to develop a sound-on-disc system.
Early sound programs featured musical and vaudeville
shorts and an occasional feature-length film with an
orchestral soundtrack — most notably the successful
1926 release of Don Juan, starring John Barrymore
(1882—1942). The breakthrough was The Jazz Singer,
an October 1927 release starring Al Jolson (1886-
1950), the phenomenal success of which not only ener-
gized the talkie revolution but secured Warner Bros.'
position at its forefront. It also sent Harry Warner head-
long into further expansion and theater conversion, but
without the assistance of Sam Warner, who died of a
cerebral hemorrhage on the eve of The Jazz Singer 's
premiere.

Shortly after the release of The Jazz Singer, construc-
tion was completed on four sound stages at Warner
Bros.' Sunset studio, and plans were finalized for com-
plete sound conversion within a year. Work began imme-
diately on a slate of "part-talkies," with efforts made at
both Vitagraph and Sunset to produce an "all-talking"
feature. That milestone was passed in July 1928 with The
Lights of New York, a Vitaphone two-reeler that was
expanded into modest feature length (57 minutes) by
director Bryan Foy (1896-1977), a veteran producer of
Vitaphone shorts. Hollywood's first all-talking feature
film was a commercial hit, providing further impetus
for Warner Bros.' breakneck expansion. In September
1928 Warner Bros, purchased the Stanley Corporation
of America, a chain of 250 theaters, and in October
bought controlling interest in a fully integrated company,
First National, whose holdings included a massive studio
facility in Burbank, north of Hollywood. Harry Warner

closed the decade with the November 1929 purchase of
the remaining First National stock, thus completing
Warner Bros.' rapid climb to integrated major status.

In terms of filmmaking, the most significant devel-
opments during this phase involved the company's exec-
utive personnel, as Jack Warner assumed control of the
West Coast production operations and the role of pro-
duction chief was gradually assumed by Darryl Zanuck
(1902-1979), who had joined the studio as a screen-
writer in 1924 (at age twenty-two) and by the late
1920s had become the studio's de facto production
supervisor. Another key executive was Hal B. Wallis
(1899-1986), who joined Warner's publicity department
in 1922 (at age twenty-three) and by the late 1920s was
managing First National studio as it was being converted
to sound. When that conversion was completed, the
Burbank lot became the principal Warner Bros, facility.
The newly melded company, known briefly as Warner
Bros. -First National, reduced its output from some
eighty pictures per year in the late 1920s to about fifty-
five per year during the 1930s. Virtually all of Warner's
top feature production came under the supervision of
Darryl Zanuck, who by 1930 was earning $5,000 per
week — a hefty sum by any studio's standards, and indi-
cative of Zanuck's value to the company. During the next
few years, operating under Zanuck as "central producer,"
Warner's studio style began to take shape. The
Depression was also a huge factor, in that it forced the
studio to reduce output and to operate more econom-
ically, which meant tighter budgets, lower-cost contract
talent (especially stars), and a heavier reliance on genre —
the key ingredients to Warner's emergent studio style.

CLASSICAL-ERA WARNER BROS.

During the early 1930s, Zanuck orchestrated the devel-
opment of the film narratives, genres, and production
trends that would define Warner Bros, for the next two
decades, featuring contemporary stories "torn from
today's headlines" distinguished by a cynicism and
hard-bitten realism in style, tone, and technique.
Zanuck also cultivated stables of contract talent who were
the key creators of the Warner's style, notably a new crop
of stars like Edward G. Robinson (1893-1973), James
Cagney (1899-1986), Paul Muni (1895-1967), Dick
Powell (1904-1963), and Ruby Keeler (1909-1993),
and a cadre of high-speed, no-nonsense directors includ-
ing Mervyn LeRoy (1900-1987), Roy Del Ruth (1893-
1961), Michael Curtiz (1886-1962), Archie Mayo
(1891-1968), and William Dieterle (1893-1972).
Warner's trademark genres in the early Depression era
were the gangster film and backstage musical, spurred by
the 1931 gangster classics Little Caesar (starring
Robinson) and The Public Enemy (starring Cagney), the

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SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Warner Bros.

MICHAEL CURTIZ

b. Mihaly Kertesz, Budapest, Hungary, 24 December 1888, d. 10 April 1962

Warner Bros.' consummate house director during the
classical era, Michael Curtiz was an expert technician who
worked in a variety of genres and with a wide range of top
studio stars, and like all of Warner's long-term contract
directors, he was amazingly prolific. Curtiz directed nearly
one hundred features over some twenty-seven years at
Warner (1926—1953), including over fifty films during the
manic 1930s. Most were routine studio fare, although he
occasionally directed prestige productions like the Errol
Flynn-Olivia de Havilland vehicles. As Warner's output
slowed and its ambitions increased during the 1940s, Curtiz
handled many of the studio's top pictures, including back-
to-back hits in 1942, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca,
two of Warner's signature wartime releases.

Born and raised in Budapest, where he began his film
career (as Mihaly Kertesz), Curtiz was directing films in
Germany when Warner signed him in 1926. During his
first decade at Warner Bros., Curtiz proved eminently
adaptable to the studio machinery and the Hollywood
idiom, although he was overshadowed by other Warner
directors like Mervyn LeRoy, Roy del Ruth, and Lloyd
Bacon. His breakthrough came in 1935 on Captain Blood,
the first of the studio's romantic swashbucklers co-starring
Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. The film was a hit,
and from that point the careers of the frantic, disciplined
Curtiz and the dashing, irrepressible Flynn were inexorably
entwined — despite the fact that the two men detested one
another. From a sword-wielding Brit in Captain Blood, The
Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin
Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940) to a gun-toting
westerner in Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), and
Virginia City (1940), Curtiz and Flynn fashioned a new
breed of Warners hero — more athletic, romantic, and
gallant than those portrayed by James Cagney, Paul Muni,
or Humphrey Bogart and a mythic figure who only made
sense in costume or in uniform.

Curtiz eventually severed the alliance with Flynn,
whose career and caretaking were handed off to Raoul
Walsh. Meanwhile, Curtiz handled projects that signaled
his stature at Warners as well as his remarkable range:
wartime thrillers like Casablanca, Mission to Moscow
(1943), and Passage to Marseille (1944); dark melodramas
like Mildred Pierce (1945), The Unsuspected (1947), and
Flamingo Road (1949); period comedies like Roughly
Speaking (1945) and Life With Father (1947); and musicals
like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Night and Day ( 1 946) ,
Romance on the High Seas (1948), My Dream Ls Yours
(1949), and Young Man with a Horn (1950).

By the early 1950s, however, the studio system was
collapsing and Curtiz was losing his edge — scarcely
surprising, considering how much the Warner system and
Curtiz, the house director, were attuned to one another —
and he finally left Warner Bros, in 1953. His next two
projects, The Egyptian (1954) and White Christmas (1954),
were lavish star vehicles that well indicated his lofty
industry stature, but Curtiz was lost once he left the
Warners lot and his career was effectively over.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum
(1933), Captain Blood (1935), Kid Galahad (1937), The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces
(1938), Dodge City (1939), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),
This Is the Army (1943), Casablanca (1942), Mildred Pierce
(1945), Life with Father (1947), Young Man with a Horn
(1950), White Christmas (1954)

FURTHER READING

Behlmer, Rudy H. Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951). New
York: Viking, 1985.

Robertson, James C. The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of
Michael Curtiz. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Thomas Schatz

prison dramas I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932,
with Muni) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932, with
Spencer Tracy), and the backstage musicals 42nd Street
(1933, with Powell and Bebe Daniels) and Gold Diggers
of 1933 (1933, with Powell, Keeler, Joan Blondell

[1906-1979], and Ginger Rogers [1911-1995]). The
latter were vigorous urban dramas with the same cynical
edge as the gangster films' but were interspersed with
lavish musical numbers directed, designed, and choreo-
graphed (often with kaleidoscopic routines shot from

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Warner Bros.

Michael Curtiz. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

overhead) by the inimitable Busby Berkeley (1895—
1976). Another important early cycle included historical
costume dramas and biographies ("biopics") like Disraeli
(1929), Alexander Hamilton (1931), and Voltaire (1933),
starring George Arliss (1868-1946) and directed by
Alfred Green (1889-1960), which were among the stu-
dio's more costly and prestigious productions. In terms
of sheer efficiency and directing talent, the studio's top
filmmaker was Mervyn LeRoy, who was versatile enough
to handle Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain
Gang, and Gold Diggers of 1933, and efficient enough to
direct twenty-three films from 1930 to 1933.

March 1933 marked a crucial moment for the indus-
try and for Warner Bros. The new president, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), declared a "bank holi-
day" and National Recovery campaign, mandating salary
cuts throughout US industry. Whereas the studio owners,
including the Warners, readily complied, Zanuck insisted
that, despite massive losses in 1931 and 1932, Warner
Bros, had weathered the Depression and thus the salary
cuts were unnecessary. When the Warners stood firm,
Zanuck resigned; with Joseph Schenck (1878-1961), he
created 20th Century Pictures, an independent produc-
tion company that would merge with Fox two years later.
Zanuck was succeeded by Hal Wallis, a capable admin-

istrator who lacked the vision, drive, and creative
instincts of his predecessor, but who worked effectively
with Jack Warner to further refine the studio's distinctive
style. During the Wallis era, Warner sustained its trade-
mark gangster and musical cycles, replaced George Arliss
(who left for 20th Century with Zanuck) with Paul Muni
as its resident biopic star, and launched several crucial
new star-genre formulas as well — notably women's films
with Bette Davis (1908-1989) and swashbuckling
romances with Errol Flynn (1909-1959) and Olivia de
Havilland (b. 1916).

All of these cycles were maintained by production
units under the purview of supervisors like Henry Blanke
(1901-1981), Sam Bischoff (1890-1975), and Robert
Lord (1900-1976), who in 1937 finally began getting
screen credit as "associate producers" after years of resist-
ance from the Warners. The key figures in these units
generally were a staff director and a contract star, as with
the Flynn-de Havilland romances directed by Michael
Curtiz and the Cagney crime dramas directed by Lloyd
Bacon (1889-1955). The studio's most efficient and
accomplished team was the biopic unit featuring Paul
Muni, director William Dieterle, and cinematographer
Tony Gaudio (1883-1951); under the producer Henry
Blanke, this team turned out some of Warner's most
acclaimed films of the decade, including The Story of
Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937).
The Davis melodramas relied less on any one director (or
producer) than on screenwriter Casey Robinson, com-
poser Max Steiner, and costume designer Orry-Kelly,
who collaborated on Dark Victory (1939), The Old
Maid (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Now,
Voyager (1942), and other Davis vehicles. Meanwhile,
producer Bryan Foy oversaw Warner's B-picture opera-
tion, which cranked out twenty-five to thirty high-speed,
low-cost productions per year, most of them urban crime
films and melodramas and none of which featured top
talent on either side of the camera.

Warner Bros, had a strong penchant for typecasting
during the 1930s, which some stars like Errol Flynn
preferred while others like Davis, Cagney, and Robinson
openly resisted, battling Wallis and Jack Warner for better
and more varied roles. Whereas the top stars eventually
won greater authority over their films, contract players
with less "marquee value" had little recourse besides "sus-
pension" — that is, an unpaid leave with suspended time
added to the term of their contract. Warner's suspension
policy was challenged in the courts by de Havilland, which
cost her two years of her career in the early 1940s but
resulted in a historic ruling that ended the studios'
entrenched, industrywide suspension system.

Warner Bros.' economic fortunes surged during the
war era, when its production operations, market strategy,

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Warner Bros.

BETTE DAVIS

b. Ruth Elizabeth Davis, Lowell, Massachusetts, 5 April 1908, d. 6 October 1989

Bette Davis's eighteen-year stint with Warner Bros.
(1931—1949) was remarkable for several reasons. As the
only top female star at a studio with a predominantly male
ethos, she effectively countered the films of James Cagney,
Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, and Humphrey Bogart
in a steady output of quality "woman's pictures." Davis
lacked the physical beauty and sexual allure that were
deemed essential for Hollywood stardom, relying instead
on her acting skills and her work ethic (she appeared in
some fifty films while at the studio).

Early on, Warner Bros, had no idea what to do with
the headstrong, gifted Davis, whose screen persona was
crucially shaped in projects that she engineered. In 1934,
after two unhappy years with Warner, Davis convinced the
studio to loan her to RKO to co-star in Of Human Bondage

(1934) , in which she delivered a powerful performance in a
role that was at once captivating and utterly unsympathetic.
Its success improved her status back at the studio, and she
won an Oscar® a year later for her role in Dangerous

(1935) , an altogether routine Warner crime drama that
underscored the studio's perception of her as a "female
Jimmy Cagney." Subsequent battles with Jack Warner gave
Davis a new contract and increased creative control over her
pictures, leading to an agreement to bring in William Wyler
(then under contract to Sam Goldwyn) to direct Jezebel
(1938), another career-defining role.

Davis's bravura performance in Jezebel as a spoiled,
headstrong Southern belle eventually redeemed through
suffering won Davis another Oscar®; even more
important, it solidified Warner's commitment to quality
women's pictures with suitable roles for Davis. The result
was an extraordinary run of pictures over the next four
years, including The Sisters (1938), Dark Victory (1939),

The Old Maid (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940),
The Letter (1940), The Great Lie (1941), The Little Foxes
(1941), and Now, Voyager (1942). Many were scripted by
Casey Robinson, who became Davis's chief collaborator at
Warner Bros., and each role was a variation on the
contradictory heroine in Jezebel, with Davis cast either as
an emasculating shrew or an engaging innocent.

Davis tried lighter fare, including an occasional
comedy, but women's pictures remained her metier. Few
of her subsequent films matched that extraordinary prewar
run, however, and after a succession of lavish postwar
disappointments, she left Warner Bros. Davis immediately
enjoyed a "comeback" at Fox with All About Eve (1950),
but in fact her career as a top star was winding down. In
the 1960s she experienced an odd resurgence in a cycle of
thrillers and gothic horror films, including two for Warner
Bros., What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Dead
Ringer (1964), both of which were shrill send-ups of her
earlier work for the studio.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Of Human Bondage (1934) , Jezebel (1938), Dark Victory
(1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Now,
Voyager (1942), Deception (1946), All About Eve (1950),
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

FURTHER READING

Chandler, Charlotte. The Girl Who Walked Alone: Bette
Davis, A Personal Biography. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2006.

Higham, Charles. Bette: The Life of Bette Davis. New York:
Dell, 1982.

Learning, Barbara. Bette Davis: A Biography. New York:
Summit Books, 1992.

Thomas Schatz

and house style underwent significant change. The studio
phased out B-movie production altogether in the early
1940s, cutting its output in half to focus on A-class
pictures for the overheated first-run market. (Warner's
output plummeted from forty-eight films in 1941 to only
twenty-one in 1943, and averaged twenty per year for the
next five years.) Another war-related change involved an
emphasis on the domestic market, which brought a shift

in narrative and thematic focus from Europe to the
United States, especially in its costume dramas and
biopics. British-themed Flynn— de Havilland swashbuck-
lers like Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin
Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940), for instance,
gave way to westerns and American biopics like Virginia
City (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and
Gentleman Jim (1942). Meanwhile, other major changes

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351

Warner Bros.

Bette Davis. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

in studio style had little or nothing to do with the war, as
with the transition in Warner's trademark crime films
from gangster sagas to "hardboiled" thrillers and film
noir. That transition was spurred by the emergence of
Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) as a top star in two
1941 films, High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon; he
secured his status as Warner's most important wartime
star a year later in Casablanca. Bogart's value to the
studio was underscored by the departure of both
Cagney and Robinson in 1942, although the rise of
John Garfield (1913-1952) in war films like Air Force
(1943), Destination Tokyo (1943), and Pride of the
Marines (1945) also helped offset those losses.

The acute reduction of Warner Bros.' wartime out-
put coincided with a radical change in production man-
agement, as the studio relied increasingly on independent
producers. This trend began in 1940 with deals involving
Jesse Lasky (1880-1958) for Sergeant York (1941) and
Frank Capra (1897-1991) for Meet John Doe (1941) and
Arsenic and Old Lace (completed in early 1 942 but not
released until 1944). It accelerated in early 1942 when
Warner Bros, signed independent deals with "Wallis,
Howard Hawks (1896-1977), and Mark Hellinger
(1903-1947). The Wallis deal, which committed him
to four pictures per year for the next four years, signaled
Warner's shift away from a "central producer" system;

it was especially significant because Wallis's first inde-
pendent project was Casablanca, a huge hit that gave
Warner Bros, the Oscar® for best picture but generated
a clash with Jack Warner that led to Wallis's departure in
1944. By then Warner had moved completely to a unit-
producer system, with top contract producers like Henry
Blanke and Jerry Wald (1911—1962) as well as quasi-
independent producer-directors like Hawks and John
Huston (1906-1987) enjoying unprecedented control
over their pictures.

Like all of the studios, Warner Bros, saw its profits
surge immediately after the war, although in Warner's
case revenues peaked in 1947 (versus 1946 for the other
studios) before starting a steep decline. Moreover,
Warner's late- 1940s fade was not as severe because it
was producing fewer pictures and unloading its contract
talent and other resources at a rapid rate. Warner Bros,
produced very few top hits during the postwar era,
although it did sustain its trademark noir thrillers, dark
dramas, and women's pictures. Bogart's star continued to
ascend with the Hawks-directed film noir masterwork
The Big Sleep (1946), and two consummate Huston
films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Key
Largo (1948). Davis's star was rapidly falling, but former
MGM diva Joan Crawford (1904-1977) came out of
retirement to star in several Warner Bros, hits, including
Mildred Pierce (1945) and FLumoresque (1946). Two
especially telling postwar star vehicles were Key Largo,
which teamed Bogart and Lauren Bacall (b. 1924) with
Edward G. Robinson, and White Heat (1949), a low-
budget crime thriller starring James Cagney. More than
any of Warner Bros.' other postwar films, these two
signaled the end of its classical-era star-genre cycles, as
Robinson and Cagney each portrayed a gangster throw-
back whose requisite demise at film's end comes in truly
spectacular fashion.

THE TELEVISION ERA AND THE
NEW HOLLYWOOD

When the movie industry's postwar collapse caught
up with Warner Bros, in 1948, contracts with top stars
like Davis, Bogart, and Flynn were phased out, as were
many other contract personnel. Conditions became so
dire, in fact, that, despite a suspension of production
for several months to regroup, the studio still failed to
place a single film in the top twenty-five box-office
releases in 1949. Deep budget cuts and personnel layoffs
offset falling revenues in 1950, when Warner Bros,
actually posted net profits of $10.2 million — ironically
the highest of any studio that year, and Warner's first-
ever finish atop the Hollywood heap. The company
continued to struggle in the early 1950s, gradually (and
grudgingly) coming to terms with an industry geared to

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Warner Bros.

Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

freelance talent, independent production, and a burgeon-
ing blockbuster mentality. Warner's most important
films at the time were produced by independents and
bore little resemblance to its classical era films — as with
Charles K. Feldman's (1904-1968) production of A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for instance, or The
Searchers (1956), produced by Merian C. Cooper
(1893-1973) and directed by his long-time partner,
John Ford (1894—1973). Even projects involving former
contract talent were distinctly at odds with the film-
makers' earlier work for the studio. Hawks and Huston
returned as freelance producer-directors in the mid-
1950s, for instance, and their respective productions,
Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and Moby Dick (1956), were
lavish color spectacles that bore no resemblance at all to
their preceding Warner's films, The Big Sleep and Key
Largo. Warner Bros, did successfully develop one con-
tract star during the 1950s, James Dean (1931-1955),

who shot to stardom in East of Eden, Rebel Without a
Cause (both 1955), and Giant (1956), but was killed in a
car accident just weeks after completing Giant.

Warner's move to "bigger" independent movie pro-
ductions in the 1950s was a matter of necessity, but its
venture into telefilm series production evinced the bold-
ness displayed when the company pioneered talkies three
decades earlier. In early 1955, Warner's entered a deal
with the ABC-TV network to produce an hour-long
series, Warner Brothers Presents, designed to expand three
of its feature fdms, Casablanca, Kings Row (1942), and
Cheyenne (1947), into rotating series, with the last quar-
ter-hour of each program devoted to promoting the
studio and its upcoming movie releases. After the initial
(1955-1956) season only Cheyenne remained, becoming
a major hit and a watershed in network television's move
to studio-produced hour-long telefilm series — especially
Westerns, with Warner Bros. Television generating a

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353

Warner Bros.

remarkable run of hits from 1957 to 1958, including
Sugarfoot, Maverick, Colt .45, and Bronco. By 1959
Warner Bros, was producing over one-third of ABC's
prime-time programming, and as Christopher Anderson
has apdy noted, the studio managed to adapt its assembly-
line, B-picture operation to the requirements of network
series production.

Warner's motion picture operation continued to
adapt as well, turning out big-budget musical hits in
the early 1960s like The Music Man (1962), Gypsy
(1962), and My Fair Lady (1964), and then, later in the
decade, producing several of the key films in a veritable
American new wave — a "director's cinema" that rede-
fined the independent movement and marked yet
another significant break with studio tradition.
Warner's contribution to the movement was extensive
and quite impressive, and it included Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (directed by Mike Nichols, 1966),
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Bullitt (Peter
Yates, 1968), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969),

Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), A Clockwork
Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), McCabe & Mrs. Miller
(Robert Altman, 1971), Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971),
Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Mean Streets
(Martin Scorsese, 1973), and Badlands (Terrence
Malick, 1973). These auteur films scarcely evinced a
consistent studio style, although they did manifest a
coherent market strategy and a sustained effort to court
a new generation of filmmakers and a younger, hipper,
more political and cine-literate audience.

Warner Bros.' changing production and market
strategy was directly related to changes in ownership
and management. These began when Jack Warner, the
last of the original owner-operators, decided to sell his
stock to the Canadian company Seven Arts, leading to
the studio's brief (1967-1969) incarnation as Warner
Brothers-Seven Arts. A severe market slump in 1969 led
to another sale, this time to a heavily capitalized, highly
diversified conglomerate, Kinney Service Corporation.
Kinney's president and CEO, Steve Ross, created

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Warner Bros.

Warner Communications Inc. (WCI), which he built
over the next two decades into a model media conglom-
erate, with Warner Bros, as its principal asset. Ross
immediately brought in three new top executives to run
WCI's movie division: former agent Ted Ashley as chair-
man and CEO, independent producer John Calley as
head of production, and attorney Frank Wells as studio
president. In the course of the 1970s, the trio turned
massive losses into steady profits, thanks mainly to a few
huge hits like The Exorcist (1973), All the President's Men
(1976), and Superman (1978), as well as a steady output
of more modest successes involving Clint Eastwood
(b. 1930), whose partnership with Warner's — mainly via
his Malpaso Company — generated literally dozens of hit
films in the ensuing decades. Warner's Eastwood hits
during the 1970s included Dirty Harry (1971) and its first
two sequels, Magnum Force (1973), and The Enforcer
(1976); westerns like the Eastwood-directed The Outlaw
Josie Wales (1976); and the offbeat Every Which Way But
Loose (1978), an action-buddy comedy starring Eastwood
and featuring an orangutan, and its sequel, Any Which
Way You Can (1980), which were huge box-office hits.

Studio and parent company underwent further
changes in the 1980s, as Warner's steadily adapted to
the current era of global media conglomerates. Ross
began an aggressive campaign to expand WCI's media
holdings in the early 1980s, and he also replaced the
studio management team with Robert Daly, who became
"Warner Bros.' chairman and CEO in 1980, and Terry
Semel, who was named president in 1981. Daly and
Semel took charge of the movie division just as Ross
was shifting his focus to WCI's video-game division,
Atari, whose fantastic profits led to overly aggressive
expansion and, by 1983, record losses for WCI. At that
point Ross retrenched, selling Atari and refocusing on
more "traditional" media — movies, television, cable,
music, and publishing. Soon WCI was back on track,
and Warner Bros, resumed its dominant position within
the media empire. The studio was generally successful
despite it widely diverse output, with the only real con-
sistency coming from Eastwood's male action films, the
Superman sequels, and the increasingly inevitable
impulse to turn film hits into movie franchises, as with
Police Academy (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), and many
others. Moreover, Warner Bros.' evergreen Looney Tunes
division — the home of cartoon veterans Bugs Bunny,
Daffy Duck, and others, which dated back to the
1930s — was successfully revived in the 1980s, generating
additional feature films and cable TV programming, as
well as a licensing-and-merchandising operation that by
the 1990s fueled a growing chain of Warner Bros, retail
stores.

TIME WARNER: THE MODERN
CONGLOMERATE ERA

The year 1989 was a watershed for Warner Bros, on two
interrelated fronts. One was the release of Batman, a feat
of blockbuster filmmaking that effectively redefined the
creation and propagation of the movie-driven global
entertainment franchise. Batman reached $100 million
in only ten days, a studio record, and went on to become
the biggest hit and the most successful franchise in
Warner's history to that point. Much of that success
was due to the other epochal event in 1989, WCI's
merger with Time, Inc., which marked another major
stage in Ross's relentless expansion campaign and in the
conglomeration of Hollywood as well. The Time Warner
merger was actually a $14 billion "takeover" of WCI by
Time, Inc., although it was engineered mainly by Ross in
an effort to combine Warner's assets with a publishing
giant whose holdings also happened to include crucial
media assets like HBO. The release of Batman and the
Time Warner merger took the studio, the parent com-
pany, and the industry at large into another realm, mobi-
lizing an array of merchandising and other tie-ins.

Warner's expansion continued despite Ross's
untimely death in December 1992, most notably with
the $8 billion acquisition of Turner Broadcasting System
(TBS) in 1996. This acquisition added substantially to
the Time Warner mix, bringing in further cable holdings
(CNN, TBS, et al.), three leading independent film
companies (Castle Rock, New Line, and Fine Line),
and the world's largest film and television library.
Meanwhile, the movie studio surged to unprecedented
heights, as Warner Bros, and Disney utterly dominated
the movie industry throughout the 1990s in terms of
revenues and market share. The studio's success was
spurred by the Batman and Lethal Weapon series, as well
as its Eastwood films (most notably Unforgiven, 1992)
and a steady output of top hits like Robin Hood: Prince of
Thieves (1991), The Fugitive (1993), Twister (1996), and
The Perfect Storm (2000).

Time Warner's movie fortunes surged in the early
2000s, thanks largely to the franchises launched by The
Matrix, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and The
Lord of the Rings. Designed as global entertainment
machines, all three added billions to the parent com-
pany's bottom line while indicating how complex and
multifaceted even the movie division itself had become.
Only the Harry Potter films were actually produced and
distributed by Warner Bros., while Warner's distributed
the Matrix films but had nothing at all to do with the
Rings films, which were produced and distributed by
New Line.

The success of those three franchises helped offset
the truly catastrophic losses that accompanied Time

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355

Warner Bros.

Warner's merger in early 2000 with AOL, the Internet
giant that promised to give the media company an insur-
mountable lead over its competitors in the burgeoning
Digital Age. The deal, valued at an astounding — and
massively overinflated — sum of $164 billion, was nego-
tiated by Ross's successor, Gerald Levin, and AOL's Steve
Case, and it was announced just as the "dot-com bubble"
burst and the so-called New Economy collapsed. AOL-
Time Warner had a brief disastrous run under Levin and
Case, reporting losses of $99 billion in 2002; that same
year Case was removed as executive chairman and the
corporate name reverted to Time Warner. The conglom-
erate thrived in the following years under Richard
Parsons, and was ranked by Forbes magazine in early
2005 as the world's top media company, with a market
value of $79.1 billion. (Disney was a distant second at
$57.2 billion.) By then Time Warner could count on
Warner Bros, for one or two modest, critically acclaimed
hits per year — most reliably from Eastwood-Malpaso,
which delivered Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar
Baby (2004).

Given the state of the global entertainment industry
and the media conglomerates that dominate and control
it, however, Warner Bros.' prime directive is to generate
and sustain the blockbuster franchises that now rule the
industry. Both Warner Bros, and New Line have accom-
modated Time Warner on that score — more so, in fact,
than any other motion picture subdivisions in
Hollywood. The successful regeneration of Warner's
Batman franchise with Batman Begins (2005) underscores
the studio's (and the parent company's) franchise men-
tality, although the success and relative value of that now-
antiquated series pales in comparison to Time Warner's
more recent blockbuster cycles, particularly in terms of
box-office performance. Taken together, Warner's first

three Harry Potter films and New Line's Lord of the Rings
trilogy comprise six of the top fourteen all-time world-
wide box-office hits (as of mid-2005), generating $5.56
billion in theatrical release alone — only a fraction of what
will be returned in DVD, television, and pay-cable rev-
enues, and the myriad other revenue streams. These films
are, for better or worse, the essential studio products in
an age of global media conglomerates, and the defining
products in terms of Warner Bros.' studio style.

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1994.

Bruck, Connie. Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of
Time Warner. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Higham, Charles. Warner Brothers. New York: Scribners, 1976.

Hirschhorn, Clive. The Warner Bros. Story. New York: Crown,
1979.

Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Knopf, 1980.

Klein, Alec. Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the

Collapse of AOL Time Warner. New York: Simon & Schuster,
2003.

Meyer, William R. Warner Brothers Directors. New Rochelle, NY:
Arlington House, 1978.

Mosley, Leonard. Zanuck: The Rise and Tall of Hollywood's Last
Tycoon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

Roddick, Nick. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in
the 1930s. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1983.

Wallis, Hal, and Charles Higham. Starmaker: The Autobiography
of Hal Wallis. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

Thomas Schatz

356

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

WESTERNS

The western is unique among film genres in that it is set
in a specific location and within a limited historical
period: the western frontier of North America between
roughly 1865 and 1890, from the end of the Civil War
(1861-1865) to the closing of the frontier just before the
twentieth century. Ostensibly grounded in the facts of
history, genuine locations, and the biographies of actual
individuals, the western seems a distinctly American
form, but the genre's international appeal suggests its
symbolic meanings and perhaps mythic functions. From
the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the
film western now appears to have been an artifact of the
past century, since the genre evidently no longer main-
tains either the popularity or the social significance it
enjoyed for decades. At its worst, the western's estab-
lished conventions have become worn cliches, and its
once implicit gender and racial politics now appear
explicitly offensive. Yet, premature announcements of
the "death of the western" have been made before, and
if its once vast popularity has clearly declined, the west-
ern's central importance to the history of the cinema and
to American popular culture remains undeniable.

Although viewed as one of Hollywood's most stable
genres, the western has regularly allowed for hybrids,
including western comedies {Paleface, 1948; Blazing
Saddles, 1974), western musicals {Annie Get Your Gun,
1950; Oklahoma!, 1955), a few horror westerns {Billy the
Kid versus Dracula, 1966), and even, eventually, porno-
graphic westerns {Wild Gals of the Naked West, 1962; The
Ramrodder, 1969). Moreover, if extended beyond its
exclusively narrative modes, the western has clearly
informed popular music (most obviously the type iden-
tified as "country and western"), clothing, tourist attrac-

tions (including dude ranches), toys, and furniture.
Along with its more familiar presence in films, television,
comic books, and literature, the western in disparate
media occupied a central role in the popular imagination
of American audiences and consumers for most of the
twentieth century.

ORIGINS OF THE WESTERN

Recognizable early sources of the popular western can be
located in persistent manifestations of the Pocahontas
legend, in Indian captivity narratives such as A Narrative
of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), and in travel
memoirs such as Francis Parkman's (1823-1893) The
Oregon Trail (1849). Fiction, especially James Fenimore
Cooper's (1789-1851) five Leatherstocking novels (1823-
1841) and Bret Harte's (1836-1902) frontier tales from
the late 1860s also established influential patterns for
later representations of the western hero, modeled after
Cooper's semisavage Natty Bumppo, and the emerging
frontier community. By the last decades of the nineteenth
century the conquest of the West was central to the
formation of an American national identity articulated
in Theodore Roosevelt's (1858-1919) six-volume The
Winning of the West (1889—1896), the imperialist notion
of Manifest Destiny (1885) popularized by John Fiske
(1842-1901), and the influential essay "The Significance
of the Frontier in American History" (1893) by
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861—1932), which argued
for the ongoing role of the vanishing physical frontier
as a symbolic space crucial to democratic American
individualism.

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Westerns

However, the first regular commercial packaging of
the West and its adventures for mass audiences began as
the actual "Wild West" was being tamed. Dime novels
(beginning around 1860), frontier melodramas (at their
height in the 1870s and 1880s), and Wild West shows
(from 1883 onwards) all represented the West for a
growing public eager to experience the exciting remnants
of the living history that was fading away. No single
figure embodies this transformation of the West into
the western as vividly as William F. "Buffalo Bill"
Cody (1846-1917), an authentic western figure who
translated his life and legend into popular media through
his appearances in dime novels, on stage, in his own Wild
West show (beginning in 1883), and eventually in a
number of early films. Cinema arrived just as the frontier
closed, and quickly played a major role in the developing
representation of that recent past as a romantic adven-
ture. In Chicago in 1 893, Turner delivered his lecture on
the frontier only a few miles away from Buffalo Bill's
Wild West show, and just a few months before Edison's
moving-picture camera recorded members of Cody's
company, including Native Americans and the female
sharpshooter Annie Oakley (b. 1935). Turner's view that
the frontier was now more symbolic than geographical
has been forever after linked to the emergence of the
western as one of cinema's most popular genres.

By the early twentieth century, western novels such
as Owen Wister's (1860-1938) The Virginian (1902)
and the pulp magazines replacing the dime novel satisfied
a growing appetite for western stories and images that
early cinema was also quick to exploit. Publishing as
B. M. Bower, the writer Bertha Muzzy Sinclair (1871—
1940) gained popularity beginning with Chip of the
Flying U (1904), the first in a series of humorous ranch
tales frequently adapted to film. By the time that the
prolific Zane Grey (1872-1939) published his best-
selling Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and his friend
Frederic Remington (1861-1909) began to sketch and
paint western scenes, the iconography, action-driven
plots, and basic cast of characters for the film western
were well in place, offering a formula that consumers
were willing to enjoy with only minor variations.

EARLY FILM WESTERNS AND
THE COMING OF SOUND

The western, often viewed as an unusually stable form,
did not in fact achieve definition as a film genre until
around 1910, when it became one of early cinema's most
familiar and successful products. Although Edwin
S. Porter's (1870-1941) The Great Train Robbery
(1903), produced for the Edison Company and based
on an 1896 stage melodrama, is often identified as the
first western, film historians have demonstrated that the

generic category itself was not yet firmly in place, so
Porter's film can only be identified as a western in retro-
spect. Alongside other early "cowboy pictures" and
"western romances," a vogue for often sympathetic
"Indian films" throughout the early silent period
revealed the lingering attachment to Cooper's Indians
rather than to the cowboy who would soon dominate
representations of the West. Films designated as "west-
erns" began to be produced regularly by the growing film
industry in the actual West as film companies such as
Selig-Polyscope and Bison began to relocate to
California, and in 1910 the genre found its first star in
the actor (and cofounder of the Essanay Company)
Gilbert M. Anderson (1880-1971), who as "Broncho
Billy" appeared in hundreds of short films, often as a
good-hearted outlaw. Thomas Ince concentrated on the
production of westerns in authentic locations for Bison
101 (which combined Bison and the Miller Brothers 101
Ranch Wild West show), including films featuring the
stage actor William S. Hart (1870-1946), who later was
crucial to the development of the feature-length western
for the Triangle Company. Hart's films often featured
him as a morally ambiguous "good bad man" whose
severe demeanor and attention to realistic details was
eventually challenged by the former rodeo performer
Tom Mix, whose stunt-filled films featured the kinetic
actor in flamboyant costumes. The contrast between the
grim morality of Hart's films and Mix's action-packed
romps persisted in the genre's development, with the
western's bid for historical realism regularly challenged
by less authentic but often more popular examples.

The promotion of other silent cowboy stars such as
Hoot Gibson (1892-1962), Tim McCoy (1891-1978),
and Buck Jones (1889-1942) in series westerns produced
throughout the 1920s suggests that the western marketed
male stars to a largely male audience, but the number of
early cowgirl films and stars demonstrates that the early
genre had significant appeal for female audiences as well.
Louise Lester (1867-1952) starred in a series of
"Calamity Anne" films directed by Alan Dwan for the
American Film Company between 1912 and 1914, and
Marie Walcamp (1894-1936) played cowgirl Tempest
Cody in a series of nine films for Universal in 1919. As
early as 1917, the screenwriter and director Ruth Ann
Baldwin was parodying the genre in her film 49—17-
Perhaps the most important silent cowgirl was Texas
Guinan (1884-1933), "the female Bill Hart," who
starred in westerns directed by Frank Borzage and
Francis Ford, as well as in movies from her own produc-
tion company. The fact that few of these films survive has
perhaps perpetuated the common misunderstanding of
the genre as an almost exclusively "male" form.

A number of westerns produced late in the silent
period for major studios demonstrated the mature genre's

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William S. Hart in Tumbleweeds (King Baggot, 1925). EVERETT COLLECTION, reproduced by permission.

epic ambitions: The Covered Wagon (1923), William S.
Hart's final film, Tumbleweeds (1925), and The Iron
Horse (1924), directed by John Ford (1894-1973), all
treated the western as a sprawling national history lesson.
These, and even cheaply made series westerns, relied on
extensive location shooting and thrilling stunt work,
elements that would be difficult to sustain when immo-
bile microphones and heavy sound equipment arrived to
limit filmmakers' options in the great outdoors.

Critical accounts of the western film often begin
with the appearance of Stagecoach (1939), neglecting the
steady production and popularity of the western in the
decade preceding Ford's first sound western. Like other
genres, but especially given its reliance on exteriors, the
western struggled with early sound technology, although
In Old Arizona (1929), The Virginian (1929), Billy the
Kid (1930), and the early Oscar® winner Cimarron
(1931) all found inventive ways to incorporate the dis-
tinctive sounds — of galloping hooves, gunshots, and jan-
gling spurs — that soon became as fundamental to the

experience of the genre as its iconic images. Universal's
striking Law and Order (1932) and Cecil B. DeMille's
The Plainsman (1936) invoked actual events (the shoot-
out at the OK Corral) and figures (Wild Bill Hickok
[1837-1876] and Calamity Jane [1852P-1903]) with
little concern for accurate detail, a practice that has
motivated some critics to bemoan the genre's persistent
distortions. But the early years of the sound western have
been neglected mostly because of the critical aversion to
the hundreds of formulaic series westerns ("B" westerns)
produced throughout the decade. Series westerns
exploited the sound film's ability to feature the singing
cowboy, most famously embodied by the affable Gene
Autry (1907-1998), whose films for Republic Studios
(frequently written by women) usually had the radio star
playing himself in the present, allowing for the use of
automobiles, airplanes, and radio stations in narratives
that often addressed the immediate social problems of the
Depression despite their western trappings. In fact,
Autry's films often function as populist parables, directly

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Westerns

engaging with contemporary issues in cleverly self-reflexive
ways. Perhaps inspired by Zane Gray's popular novels
featuring mythic horses, the series western also empha-
sized the talented steeds of cowboy heroes such as Autry
(Champion) and Ken Maynard (1895-1973) (Tarzan).
Throughout the period, B westerns were enormously
popular among boys, rural audiences, and women, the
latter apparently charmed by Autry's smooth voice and
gentlemanly demeanor.

THE A WESTERN IN HOLLYWOOD

While the critically celebrated Stagecoach has often
eclipsed the hundreds of westerns that preceded it, there's
no questioning the artistry or impact of the film, which
associated director Ford and star John Wayne (1907-
1979) with the genre for the rest of their long careers.
Stagecoach was in fact one example among an increased
production of prominent westerns by major Hollywood
studios (even as B westerns continued to be cranked out
by Poverty Row studios, with Roy Rogers (1911-1998)
emerging as Gene Autry's heir when the latter went to
war). In the same year as Stagecoach, 1939, Universal was
parodying the genre with George Marshall's Destry Rides
Again, while Warner Bros, produced the successful Dodge
City, directed by Michael Curtiz in Technicolor. De
Mille's Union Pacific at Paramount revived the epic,
train-centered western of the late silent period, while
historical lawmen and outlaws were revived in Allan
Dwan's Frontier Marshall for Fox, with Randolph Scott
(1898-1987) as Wyatt Earp, and in Henry King's box-
office hit Jesse James, also for Fox, starring Tyrone Power
as Jesse and Henry Fonda (1905-1982) as brother Frank.
All of these prominent westerns appeared simultaneously
with, rather than as a result of, Stagecoach, even though
Ford's film more than any other demonstrated that the
genre could produce skillfully crafted narratives and rich
characterizations, even while maintaining the commer-
cially requisite thrills of the chase and the final reel
shootout.

Across the following decade, and despite the disrup-
tion of World War II, the western's popularity contin-
ued. The Westerner (William Wyler, 1 940) earned Walter
Brennan an Oscar® for his comic yet moving depiction
of Judge Roy Bean. Other notable examples from the
period include Western Union (Fritz Lang, 1941), the
notoriously erotic The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943),
the stark The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman,
1943), the eccentric Canyon Passage 0acques Tourneur,
1946), and producer David O. Selznick's florid Duel in
the Sun (King Vidor, 1946). Ford's return to the genre
with the elegant My Darling Clementine (1946) inaugu-
rated his regular engagement with the western through-
out the postwar period. Films from the end of the decade

also demonstrated the genre's surprising affiliation with
film noir and the psychological melodrama: Pursued
(Raoul Walsh, 1947) remains the most successful fusion
of the western and film noir, while Ramrod (Andre De
Toth, 1947) effectively incorporated Freudian under-
currents. In the midst of Ford's loose "cavalry trilogy,"
consisting of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), all starring
John Wayne, director Howard Hawks (1896-1977) also
made one of the genre's masterpieces, Red River (1948),
contrasting an often unsympathetic Wayne with
Montgomery Clift in an Oedipal narrative set against
an epic cattle drive.

The 1950s eventually witnessed the decline of the
Hollywood studio system and the rise of television
(dominated in its early decades by westerns such as
Gunsmoke and Bonanza), but the period also saw a
notable upsurge in the popularity of the film western,
which critics have attempted to explain in political, eco-
nomic, and psychoanalytic terms. The era is especially
known for its "adult" or "psychological" westerns, which
turned the physical violence of the frontier inwards
towards phobias and traumas. The Gunfighter (Henry
King, 1950) dramatized the psychological cost of main-
taining a reputation as a fast gun, whereas The Left-
Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958) depicted Billy the
Kid as a troubled juvenile delinquent. Notably, James
Stewart's (1908-1997) first collaboration with director
Anthony Mann (1906-1967), Winchester 73 (1950),
began a series of bold western psychodramas, including
Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and
The Man from Laramie (1955), which were driven by
the hero's almost uncontrolled mania for revenge. In the
middle of the decade Ford released his masterpiece The
Searchers (1956), but its significance, especially in its
direct confrontation with the sexual and racial fears that
drove the conquest of Native Americans, would only be
fully appreciated by a later generation of critics and film-
makers. Films such as Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves,
1950) and The Devil's Doorway (Mann, 1950) also
treated their central Native American characters sympa-
thetically, recalling some westerns of the silent period.
The era's best-known westerns are the elemental High
Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and the self-consciously
mythic Shane (George Stevens, 1953), which might be
set against the quirky Rancho Notorious (Lang, 1952) and
the campy Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), respec-
tively featuring aging stars Marlene Dietrich and Joan
Crawford, to indicate the available range of the genre in
the period. On a more modest scale, the decade con-
cluded with the first of a series of lean and powerful films
directed by Budd Boetticher (1916-2001) and starring
Randolph Scott, beginning with Seven Men from Now
(1956) and including The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome

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JOHN FORD

b. John Martin Feeney, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, 1 February 1894, d. 31 August 1973

Although most of his more than two hundred films (four
of which garnered him Academy Awards® as best director)
were not westerns, John Ford is widely recognized as the
greatest director of the quintessential American film genre.
While Ford himself dismissed the critical evaluation of his
work that began late in his life, he is acclaimed as not only
one of the genre's key storytellers but also its intuitive
poet, a creator of evocative cultural images as meaningful
as his films' stories. After 1939 these images were
repeatedly grounded in the dramatic landscape of
Monument Valley, the location Ford made one of his
visual signatures and eventually an iconic space that
summarizes the genre itself. Ford's recurrent troupe of
actors, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond,
and Ben Johnson, came to define the western hero through
their performances in the director's films.

Ford (often with his brother Francis) made more than
thirty silent westerns, few of which survive. Beginning with
Straight Shooting (1917), by the end of the silent era Ford
had moved from modest productions to the epic The Iron
Horse (1924). Ford stayed away from westerns again until
Stagecoach (1939), a watershed in the genre's history.
Filmed in Monument Valley and featuring the B-western
actor John Wayne among an ensemble cast, it established an
ongoing link between the genre, location, star, and director
for another two decades, a confluence that resulted in some
of the western's greatest achievements. Following World
War II (in which he made documentary and propaganda
films), Ford returned to the western with My Darling
Clementine (1946), a self-consciously mythic dramatization
of the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The "cavalry trilogy" of
Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and
Rio Grande (1950), all starring Wayne, also balanced the
commercial requirement of dramatic action with quiet
nostalgia and Ford's unique attention to small details, now
performed by a set of familiar faces.

The Searchers (1956) is now recognized to be Ford's
masterpiece, a formally rigorous yet highly ambivalent and
surprisingly direct treatment of the racism and sexual

repression that fueled the conquest of the West,
concentrated in John Wayne's impressive performance as
an obsessively driven loner. The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance (1962) is a late, bittersweet exploration of the
genre's mythic values, and Ford's final western, Cheyenne
Autumn (1964), has been seen as an apology for the
director's earlier contribution to the negative
representation of Native Americans in popular cinema. By
the time that Ford received the first Lifetime Achievement
Award from the American Film Institute, he was more
widely celebrated for his westerns than for his more
literary, award-winning films such as The Informer (1935)
and How Green was My Valley ( 1 94 1 ) . While the more
conservative elements of Ford's films are regularly
challenged, their power as national myths and as defining
examples of Hollywood genre filmmaking remains
unquestioned.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Iron Horse (1924), The Informer (1935), Drums Along the
Mohawk (1939), Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My
Valley (1941), They Were Expendable (1945), My Darling
Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master (1950), Rio Grande (1950),
The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), Sergeant
Rutledge (1960), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

FURTHER READING

Buscombe, Edward. The Searchers. London: British Film

Institute, 2000.
Cowie, Peter. John Ford and the American West. New York:

Abrams, 2004.

Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1986.
McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York:

St. Martin's, 1991.
Studlar, Gaylyn, and Matthew Bernstein, eds. John Ford

Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Corey K. Creekmur

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Westerns

John Ford. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

(1959), and Comanche Station (1960): pared down to
basic elements, Boetticher's films show the genre reduced
to its core mythology. Challenging the sexual neuroses
and Oedipal tragedies of the postwar western, Hawks also
released Rio Bravo (1959), a surprisingly effective reasser-
tion of some of the genre's traditional values.

THE WESTERN IN DECLINE

As the Hollywood studio system began to break apart,
the regular production of film westerns also declined,
though early television relied on the genre to attract its
first audiences. Western films had already employed
color and widescreen processes to draw audiences away
from the small screen, and films set in the modern West,
such as Lonely Are the Brave (David Miller, 1 962) and
Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963), or addressing the growing
youth market, such as Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin, 1971),
attempted to update the old form. Nevertheless, the
lighthearted Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(George Roy Hill, 1969) emerged as one of the most
successful westerns of all time, even as the genre seemed
to be losing its relevance for younger audiences.

The late renewal of the genre would came from
somewhat surprising sources: the director Sam
Peckinpah (1925-1984), a veteran of television westerns,
released Ride the High Country (1962), starring veteran
cowboy stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea (1905-
1990) in a film that realistically announced the end of an
era. Peckinpah's greater impact came with The Wild
Bunch (1969), an extremely violent film about a team
of outlaws on the run in Mexico that was widely under-
stood as a commentary on the ongoing war in Vietnam.
Famous for its intricately edited, slow-motion blood-
baths, the film was both condemned and hailed as a
masterpiece; there is no question that it altered the future
depiction of violence in cinema. Another, even more
unanticipated source for the western's revival was the
body of Italian westerns known with some derision as
"spaghetti westerns." Drawing upon a long European
fascination with the western, the most internationally
successful and influential examples, including Per un
pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) and //
Buono, il brutto, il cattivo {The Good, The Bad, and the
Ugly, 1966) were directed by Sergio Leone (1929-1989),
at first starring the American actor Clint Eastwood
(b. 1930). Although they were even more thoroughly
stylized than Peckinpah's films, the Italian westerns
shared his vision of a largely amoral, relentlessly violent
world (though sometimes allowing moments of slapstick
comedy). Often poorly dubbed, the Italian films none-
theless changed the sound of the western as well, largely
through the unprecedented and distinctive soundtracks
of Leone's prolific composer Ennio Morricone (b. 1928),
who mixed trumpets, electric guitars, and bizarre sound
effects to drastically challenge the folksy conventions of
the traditional western soundtrack. At the very least, the
Italian western successfully challenged the implicit notion
that the genre could only be successful in the hands of
American filmmakers.

At the same time, American westerns continued to
anticipate the end of the genre's central role in American
culture, albeit in a more nostalgic vein. Late John Wayne
vehicles including True Grit (1969), The Cowboys (1972),
and The Shootist (1976) conflated the star's own physical
decline (the last two films depict his character's death)
with the genre's slow demise. In retrospect, in the 1970s
the genre was struggling to maintain its relevance
through alternately nostalgic and harshly revisionist
examples: the same period produced Hawks's traditional
Rio Lobo (1970) and the audacious assault on heroism
Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), as well as the down-
beat McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and
the surrealist El Topo ( The Mole, Alejandro Jodorowosky,
1971) Soon thereafter, the outrageous Blazing Saddles

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Eli Wallacah, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Van Cleefin the operatic showdown of II buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

(Mel Brooks, 1974) took the long tradition of the west-
ern parody to gleefully vulgar extremes, perhaps inadver-
tently rendering the traditional western impossible for
mass audiences ever to accept straightforwardly again. A
few years later, the ambitious epic and commercial failure
Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) made Hollywood
itself wary of funding productions in the genre.

THE CONTEMPORARY WESTERN
Following the deaths of Peckinpah and Leone, the tradition
of the film western has been maintained most consistently
by Clint Eastwood, who as star and director has returned
to the genre with some regularity. If Eastwood's first
American westerns seemed like pale imitations of Leone,
later works such as the gothic High Plains Drifter (1972)
and the wistful The Outlaw fosey Wales (1976) were
admired by fans and some critics before widespread
acknowledgement of Eastwood's contribution to the genre
came with Unforgiven (1992), created in some sense as the
"last western" insofar as it functions as both apology and

elegy for the genre. Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves
(1990) successfully revived the sympathetic Indian film:
surprisingly, it and Unforgiven earned Oscars® for best
picture, the first for the genre since Cimmaron. Recent
attempts at politically correct revision such as the African
American Posse (1993) and pseudo-feminist Bad Girls
(1994) have seemed poor excuses as westerns. The success-
ful Tombstone (1993) and flop Wyatt Earp (1994) both
offered elaborately staged but insignificant returns to one of
the key events and historical figures in the genre, and All the
Pretty Horses (2000) was an ineffective attempt to adapt for
the screen the award-winning 1996 novel by Cormac
McCarthy, one of the genre's most prominent novelists.
More successful recent revisions of the genre have come
from independent cinema, including The Ballad of Little fo
(Maggie Greenwald, 1993), based on a true story of a cross-
dressing woman who passed as a male sheep rancher in the
West, and the surrealist Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1996).
Certainly the most daring and surprisingly successful con-
temporary western is Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005),

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Westerns

SERGIO LEONE
b. Rome, Italy, 3 January 1929, d. 30 April 1989

The son of Italian film pioneer Vincinzo Leone and actress
Bice Waleran, Sergio Leone rose to international
prominence with a series of "spaghetti westerns" (or, more
respectfully, "westerns all'italiana") produced in Italy
during the 1960s and featuring the then relatively
unknown American actor Clint Eastwood. Leone's
westerns were preceded by other European (especially
German) examples, but his were the first non-Hollywood
westerns to gain international attention and to deeply
influence the genre.

Leone's first major film, Per un pugno di dollari (A
Fistful of Dollars, 1964), an unofficial remake of Akira
Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961), brought the
western fully into the 1960s by featuring a coolly amoral,
unshaven, poncho-draped antihero at its center: Eastwood's
"man with no name" inherited some of the genre's
conventions while subverting others, especially the
conventional ethical stability of the cowboy hero. Similarly,
Leone's celebrated "operatic" style served at once as a
romantic homage to the classic western as well as a brutal
parody of it. The director stretched the suspenseful
moments before a shoot-out to nerve-wracking lengths with
extreme close-ups of his characters perversely filling a
widescreen frame, which typically would have contained
sweeping landscapes rather than squinting eyes and
twitching fingers waiting to draw a pistol. The worldwide
success of the first film justified an even more audacious
sequel, Per qualche dollaro in piu (For a Few Dollars
More, 1965), which featured drugs, sex, and sadism, all
previously taboo in the genre. The last film in an
unofficial trilogy, // Buono, il brutto, il cattivo ( The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, 1 966) , centers on three greedy
treasure seekers hunting for gold against the epic backdrop
of the Civil War.

After Eastwood returned to Hollywood as an
international star (whose subsequent westerns owed a clear
debt to Leone), Leone's films became even more
ambitious, but were often released in mutilated versions.

Cera una volta il west (Once Upon a Time in the West,
1968), which boldly cast Hollywood legend Henry Fonda
as a villain, was poorly received and badly cut upon its
original release, but after restoration was commonly
viewed as Leone's masterpiece, an epic tribute to and
cinematic essay on the genre itself, as well as an elegy for
its impending demise.

Leone's greatest impact on the western was stylistic:
whereas nihilistic narratives and antiheroes would soon
appear in US westerns, Leone's films audaciously asserted
that the western, among the most formulaic and stable of
genres, could drastically change its look, feel, and sound.
Certainly the impact of Leone's films was immeasurably
supported by their startlingly original scores written by
Ennio Morricone, whose lush soundscapes countered
Leone's sparse landscapes (with Spain standing in for
Mexico and the US Southwest). Although they would
quickly lend themselves to parody, Leone's westerns
remain among the genre's most thorough revisions.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), Per qualche
dollaro in piii (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), // Buono, il
brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966),
Cera una volta il west (Once Upon a Time in the West,
1968), Giii la testa (Duck You Sucker, or A Fistful of
Dynamite, 1971)

FURTHER READING

Cumbow, Robert C. Once Upon a Time: The Films of Sergio
Leone. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987.

Frayling, Christopher. Sergio Leone: Something To Do with

Death. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl

May to Sergio Leone. Revised ed. London: LB. Tauris,

1998.

Hughes, Howard. Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The
Filmgoers' Guide to Spaghetti Westerns. London: LB.
Tauris, 2004.

Corey K. Creekmur

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Sergio Leone during the production of Once Upon a Time
in America (1984). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED by
PERMISSION.

which sensitively depicts the tragic love affair of two cow-
boys. After decades of invisibility on television, the western
has also enjoyed an unexpected revival through the relent-
lessly profane cable series Deadwood (beginning 2004).

THE WESTERN AND FILM STUDIES

Serious criticism of the western film began in the 1950s
with appreciative essays by Robert Warshow and Andre
Bazin, both of whom identified the genre as, in Bazin's
phrase, "the American film par excellence." Although
inattentive to cinema, Henry Nash Smith's groundbreak-
ing study Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
Myth (1950) suggested that the emerging field of
American studies and critical attention to the popular
western were intertwined projects. By the next decade,
studies in France by Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout and Henri
Agel established what would become an ongoing explo-
ration of the genre by the developing discipline of film
studies. As more theoretical approaches to film devel-
oped, the western was often the principal example for
critics attempting to refine the analysis of Hollywood
genres and the auteur, with the early attention devoted
to John Ford by critics such as Lindsay Anderson and
Andrew Sarris evidence of what could be accomplished
by an artist in an otherwise popular, commercial form.

Drawing upon both Henry Nash Smith and French
structuralism, Jim Kitses's influential Horizons West
(1969) revealed the western to be organized by a series
of "antinomies" that broadly contrasted the wilderness
and civilization. Constructing an even more rigorous
structural model, Will Wright's Sixguns and Society
(1975) analyzed the most successful westerns in light of
their social and political contexts. Although later critics
would abandon structuralist methodology, the western's
ideological significance in specific historical contexts
would remain a focus for studies such as Richard
Slotkin's ambitious series of books on the West and
American culture (1973-1992).

Other studies of the western have sought to refine
the analysis of Hollywood genres, as in the work of John
Cawelti and Edward Buscombe, among others. Genre
critics such as Steve Neale and Rick Altman have thus
found the western a useful model for exploring the larger
role of genres in film history. Ironically, the decline of the
western has been offset by a steady rise in critical atten-
tion to the genre, which has included ongoing attention
to the representation of Native Americans throughout the
western's history, as well as innovative approaches to the
roles of women in the genre. Influenced by feminist film
theory as well as queer theory, recent critics have also
turned their attention to one of the genre's more obvious
but unexplored concerns, the representation of masculin-
ity: thus scholars such as Jane Tompkins, Paul Willemen,
and Lee Clark Mitchell have interrogated what for deca-
des seemed to be a secure and unproblematic presenta-
tion of conventional gender norms. Such studies suggest,
among other things, that the western's often exclusively
male world allows for a veiled homoeroticism, and that
the genre's essential violence betrays strains of masochism
in both its characters and its fans.

More recently, criticism of the western has only
begun to consider the impact of what has been called
the "New Western History," represented by innovative
historical reconsiderations such as Patricia Nelson
Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest (1987), which argues
that real-estate deals rather than thrilling shoot-outs may
be at the heart of the winning of the West. Related work
has greatly enriched historical understanding of the role
women played in western expansion, as well as the com-
plex psychological justification for the near extermination
of Native Americans. The western has generally been
successful at keeping the facts of history at bay, but
"revisionist" westerns have often attempted to more
closely align fantasies of the West with available facts. It
remains to be seen whether or not the history of the West
that is currently being revised by historians will provide a
new source for stories for the near-dormant genre. In any
case, the body of critical work on the western alone
indicates the genre's significance in American culture

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Westerns

and cinema; however, it is telling that for audiences in
the twenty-first century the western is less likely to be
encountered at the local movie theater, where it was once
a staple, than in a college classroom, as a relic and a
representation of American cultural history.

SEE ALSO Genre; Native Americans and Cinema; Race
and Ethnicity; Violence

FURTHER READING

Bazin, Andre. "The Western, or the American Film Par

Excellence" and "The Evolution of the Western." In What is
Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 2, 140-157.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Buscombe, Edward, ed. The BFI Companion to the Western. New
York: Atheneum, 1988.

Buscombe, Edward, and Roberta E. Pearson, eds. Back in the
Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western. London: British Film
Insititute, 1998.

Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in
the Hollywood Western. New York and London: LB. Tauris, 1 997.

Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford
to Clint Eastwood. New Edition. London: British Film
Institute, 2004.

Kitses, Jim, and Gregg Rickman, eds. The Western Reader. New

York: Lunebright, 1998.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and

Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Saunders, John. The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big

Whiskey. London: Wallflower Press, 2001.

Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural
History of the Genre's First Half Century. Cambridge, UK and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Stanfield, Peter. Hollywood, Westerns, and the 1930s: The Lost
Trail. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 200 1 .

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Walker, Janet, ed. Westerns: Films through History. New York:

Routledge/American Film Institute, 2001.

Warshow, Robert. "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner." In The
Immediate Experience, revised ed., 105-124. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001.

Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the
Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Corey K. Creekmur

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WOMAN'S PICTURES

The term "woman's pictures" potentially embraces all
films — made anywhere in the world, and throughout
the history of cinema — that are about, or are made by,
or consumed by, women. In practice, however, in its
most common usage, the meaning of the term is much
narrower than this, referencing a subtype of the film
melodrama whose plot is organized around the perspec-
tive of a female character and which addresses a female
spectator through thematic concerns socially and cultur-
ally coded as "feminine." A considerable and influential
body of film history, theory, and criticism has grown up
around a highly distinctive manifestation of this genre: a
group of pictures produced in Hollywood during its
"classical" era, the heyday of the studio system between
the mid- 1930s and the mid-1950s. In their time, these
films were dubbed "women's weepies" and "three-hand-
kerchief movies," a not-very-subtle derogation of their
tearjerking qualities and of the gender of their audiences.

DEFINITION AND HISTORY

In common with the Hollywood melodrama, the woman's
picture's characteristic themes involve moral dilemmas
and conflicts associated with sexuality, home, and family,
commonly set in a middle-class milieu and played out
in stories of the fates of individuals. However, the wom-
an's picture departs from the melodrama in two key
respects: in the focus and trajectory of its narrative con-
cerns and in its rhetoric. Within the setting of the family,
issues that may be seen as of particular concern to women
are explored, while at the same time a typical plotline of
the woman's picture carries the story from a woman's
desire, through her transgression of "appropriate" codes
of female behavior and consequent temporary happiness,

through to retribution for her transgression and her
renunciation of desire and final capitulation to dominant
moral codes. A key point of distinction between the
Hollywood melodrama and the woman's picture lies in
the fact that in the latter the story is told from the
perspective of the central female character, inviting iden-
tification with the dilemmas she faces and sympathy for
her eventual fate — hence the woman's picture's notorious
tearjerking propensities.

If the classic Hollywood woman's picture is a sub-
genre of the Hollywood melodrama, it also has subgenres
of its own. According to Mary Ann Doane, they include
the medical melodrama, in which a traumatized or dis-
turbed female character tells her story to a sympathetic
(male) doctor (for example, Possessed, 1947); the maternal
melodrama, whose plot centers on a mother-daughter
relationship and which is typically narrated from the
mother's point of view {Mildred Pierce, 1945); the love
story, which focuses on impossible choices, misunder-
standings, and consequent loss endured by a woman in
love {Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1948); and the
paranoid gothic woman's picture, in which the central
character is troubled by fear and suspicion of the
motives and behavior of her husband {Secret Beyond the
Door, 1947).

Defined thus as a particular set of themes and rhet-
orics, and comprising its various subtypes, the Hollywood
woman's picture enjoyed its high point during a relatively
limited period of time, mainly during the 1 940s. The two
film versions of Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst's (1933)
novel about a white woman, her black female friend,
and their respective daughters neatly bookend the genre's

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Woman 's Pictures

classic era. While the plot of John Stahl's (1886-1950)
1934 adaptation centers on the kinds of issues that
were to become the hallmark of the classic maternal
melodrama, narrative viewpoint in the film is relatively
unfocused and no clear point of identification emerges.
On the other hand, the plot of Douglas Sirk's (1897—
1987) 1959 remake edges away from maternal issues
and moves towards concerns that dominated the 1950s
family melodrama, which typically centers on, and con-
structs points of identification with, wayward adolescents
(as in Vicente Minnelli's [1903-1986] Home From the
Hill, 1960).

For a while, then, the woman's picture enjoyed a
high profile in Hollywood's output, and during this
period a number of Hollywood's foremost directors
made at least one "weepie." Some of these directors are
not associated with melodrama, nor indeed with female-
centered plots of any sort (for example, Alfred Hitchcock
[1899-1980], whose paranoid gothic woman's picture,
Rebecca, was released in 1940). Others include Sirk,
whose key contribution as a Hollywood director was to
the family melodrama rather than to the woman's pic-
ture, but whose Sleep, My Love (1948) is also very much
in the paranoid gothic mould, and George Cukor (1899-
1983), best-known for his strong female characters in
musicals and romantic comedies, who directed the woman's
pictures Gaslight (1944) and A Woman's Face (1941). No
Hollywood director made a career or a reputation directing
woman's pictures, though; this was a reflection, undoubt-
edly, of the low esteem in which "women's weepies" were
held in their time.

If the lifespan of the woman's picture was short, the
genre had its predecessors as well as its successors. The
capacious genre of melodrama has been a staple of pop-
ular cinema from its beginnings, and many of the earliest
films featured female-centered plots or dealt in some way
with "women's issues": motherhood (in D. W. Griffith's
The Eternal Mother, 1912), for example, and doomed
romance (in Frank Borzage's celebrated 1927 tearjerker,
Seventh Heaven). Moreover, into the 1920s, a number of
female directors specialized in pictures of this sort, most
famously, in Hollywood, Lois Weber (1881-1939),
whose often controversial social problem melodramas
tackled such "women's issues" as divorce, child abuse,
and birth control {Where Are My Children?, 1916; The
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, 1917). However, while the
female desire-transgression-renunciation plot was already
a feature of many such films, their viewpoints and iden-
tifications are diffuse by comparison with those of the
1940s woman's picture, and their attitudes towards
female transgression more unremittingly punitive.

In the 1950s and later, by contrast, the intensely
female-centered plots and rhetoric that distinguish the

classic woman's picture disappear, giving way, in stories
of familial relationships, to films about the "generation
gap" (as in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, 1955),
disturbances and dysfunctions within the family (for
example, Ray's Bigger than Life, 1956), and plots cen-
tered on male characters (as in Sirk's There's Always
Tomorrow, 1956), about rekindled love between a mar-
ried man and an old flame, told from the man's point of
view. At the same time, the themes and rhetoric associ-
ated with the woman's picture largely migrated from
cinema to television, in particular to social problem
dramas and the soap opera. Where woman's picture
themes still figure on cinema screens, they increasingly
surface in films that are generic hybrids, such as Thelma
and Louise (1991), which constructs a female-centered
narrative viewpoint but within the conventions of a char-
acteristically male-centered genre, the buddy movie. And
to the extent that the family melodrama survives on the
cinema screen, it has tended not to be female-centered in
terms of either plot or rhetoric. Examples include Terms
of Endearment (1983), Ordinary People (1980), and
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).

Where the woman's picture endures, it does so in the
shape of the maternal melodrama. But even here, in films
about the eternally troubled relationship between moth-
ers and daughters, the woman's picture's distinctive char-
acteristics are diluted. Such films may seem uncertain in
their address, as, for example, in Divine Secrets of the Ya-
Ya Sisterhood (2002), whose narrative viewpoint alter-
nates, at times vertiginously, not just between mother
and daughter, but between other characters as well.
Alternatively, their plots lack believability in a contem-
porary setting: in Stella, a 1990 remake of King Vidor's
1937 Stella Dallas, for example, the protagonist's self-
sacrificial renunciation of her daughter seems unneces-
sary, even ludicrous. Perhaps because it explores new
territory by placing black women at the center of both
plot and narration, however, Steven Spielberg's The Color
Purple (1985) revives and renews many of the features of
the classic woman's picture.

FILM THEORY AND THE WOMAN'S PICTURE

It was not until several decades after its heyday that the
classic Hollywood woman's picture at last began to
attract serious critical and scholarly attention; in fact, this
much-denigrated genre has inspired some of the most
significant advances of the past twenty-five years in film
history, theory, and criticism. In the 1970s and 1980s,
film critics who were also feminists began to interest
themselves in the place of women in cinema — at first
looking at women as characters in films and as film-
makers and later at women as spectators of films.

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GEORGE CUKOR
b. New York, New York, 7 July 1899, d. 24 January 1983

The son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, George Cukor
began his career directing plays on Broadway. In 1929 he
moved to Hollywood, embarking on a fifty-year career in the
course of which he directed more than fifty films, from his
debut picture at Paramount, Grumpy (1930), to Rich and
Famous (1981). Reflecting his background in the theater, many
of Cukor's best-known films are adaptations of stage plays (such
as The Philadelphia Story, 1940, andA/y Fair Lady, 1964) or are
set in the world of actors and acting (including Sylvia Scarlett,
1935, A Star is Born, 1954, and Les Girls, 1957).

However, while Cukor's cinema work embraces a
variety of genres, he is probably best remembered for
sophisticated comedies like Adam 's Rib (1949) and Born
Yesterday (1950), with their trademark quirky, and very
modern, heroines. Cukor worked with many of
Hollywood's finest actresses (among them, most
memorably, Katharine Hepburn and Judy Holliday) and
female scriptwriters. (Ruth Gordon co-scripted the
enduring Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicles
Adam's Rib [1949] and Pat and Mike [1952].) This earned
him a reputation as a "women's director."

Cukor's independent, acerbic, intelligent heroines are
never less than interesting, and his films characteristically
proffer a kind of feminine angle on the world. Yet they
rarely identify fully with the woman's point of view, nor as
a rule do they address themselves exclusively to a female
audience. In this regard, Cukor has been likened to the
American novelist Henry James.

In the 1940s, however, like many other Hollywood
directors of the time, Cukor ventured into directing
"woman's pictures" — family melodramas with "female-
centered" plots, closely addressed to female spectators and
audiences. A Woman's Face (1941), made at MGM, stars

Joan Crawford as a nursemaid with a hideously scarred
face who is eventually redeemed from a life of bitterness.
Gaslight (1944), another MGM film and an example of
the paranoid gothic woman's picture, stars Ingrid
Bergman as an upper-middle-class Victorian wife whose
husband (Charles Boyer) is methodically driving her
insane.

Released in 1981, Cukor's last film, Rich and
Famous — he was over eighty when he directed it — is a
story of female friendship, featuring Jacqueline Bisset and
Candice Bergen as college acquaintances whose difficult
relationship survives many years and divergent life choices.
As a remake of the 1943 Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins
vehicle, Old Acquaintance, the swansong of this veteran
"women's director" fittingly pays homage to, and updates,
the classic Hollywood woman's picture of the 1940s.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Philadelphia Story (1940), A Women's
Face (1941), Gaslight (1944), Adam's Rib (1949), Born
Yesterday (1950), Pat and Mike (1952), A Star Is Born
(1954), My Fair Lady (1964)

FURTHER READING

CineAction!, "Hitchcock and Cukor," 50 (1999).
Clarens, Carlos. George Cukor. London: Seeker and Warburg/
British Film Institute, 1976.

Higham, Chalres, and Joel Greenberg. The Celluloid Muse:
Hollywood Directors Speak. Chiacgo: Regnery, 1972.

Lambert, Gavin. On Cukor. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1972.

Levy, Emanuel. George Cukor, Master of Elegance: Hollywood's
Legendary Director and His Stars. New York: Morrow,
1994.

Annette Kuhn

In contributions to analyzing the internal textual
operations of films and to developing methods for inter-
preting films, some of these critics explored the potential
for reading mainstream Hollywood films "against the
grain," against the surface meanings they offered, pro-
ducing interpretations that opened up a space for under-
standing women's engagements with films that, on the
face of it, seemed to reinforce patriarchal attitudes

towards women. Foremost among such films, of course,
is the woman's picture, with its fictions of female desire,
transgression, punishment, and loss. Could the female-
centered narrative viewpoint that marks out the woman's
picture, in eliciting identification with the protagonist
and sympathy for her plight, undercut the characteristic
storyline in which she is restored to her "proper" place?
Could the text, at a subtextual or unconscious level,

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369

Woman 's Pictures

George Cukor. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

generate contradictions that the film's eventual resolution
could not contain?

In an essay on the relationship between melodrama
and the woman's picture, Pam Cook has argued that, in
exploring the conflicts faced by women in patriarchy, the
woman's picture can never satisfactorily resolve these
dilemmas, because it "must first posit the possibility of
female desire, and a female point-of-view, thus posing
problems for itself which it can scarcely contain" (p. 17).
Thus, while the woman's picture brings to the fore the
possibility of female desire, the conventions of the genre
must at the same time seek to contain it. This conflict, it is
then argued, disturbs the text of the woman's picture,
which is marked by such "symptoms" as circular rather
than linear narrative structure; "impossible" or implausible
"resolutions"; multiple points of view; and themes of
blindness, mental instability, and suchlike. In this sense,
the woman's picture came to be considered the limit case
of classical cinema under pressure, a point amply demon-
strated in Cook's reading of the maternal melodrama
Mildred Pierce, which tells the story of a troubled
mother-daughter relationship and in whose closing scene
the eponymous heroine (played by Joan Crawford) goes
back to her less-than-satisfactory husband.

Alongside these advances in thinking on film's form
and textual operations, film theorists began to consider
what is distinctive about spectatorship in cinema.

Following Christian Metz's exploration of the uncon-
scious aspects of spectatorial engagements with films,
Laura Mulvey advanced the concept of a gendered gaze
and gendered spectatorship, thereby introducing the
conundrum of the possibility of pleasure in cinema for
the female spectator. In her 1987 study of "ideological
stress" in the classic woman's picture, Doane takes up
this idea, distinguishing between the woman's picture's
subgenres on the basis of the kind of gaze, or mode of
spectatorship, each elicits: in the medical melodrama, she
argues, "the woman is most nearly the pure object of the
gaze"; the maternal melodrama is marked by voyeurism;
the love story by a narcissistic gaze; and the paranoid
gothic by the "aggressivity ... of the look . . . directed
against" the woman (pp. 178-179).

Doane shows that the woman's picture offers ample
scope for drawing on concepts from psychoanalysis in
analyzing classical cinema's rhetoric and modes of spec-
tatorial engagement; and in relation more specifically to
the woman's picture, her work raises a number of key
questions. Does the woman's picture set up a specifically
female, or feminine, position for the spectator? Does it
provide some space for the free play of female desire, or
does it simply document a troubling of patriarchally
defined modes of subjectivity centered upon the figure
of the woman? Questions about female spectatorship
raised by the woman's picture have wide-ranging impli-
cations not only for film theory, but for the historical,
social, and cultural study of the medium as well. Above
all, they demand a distinction between, on the one hand,
the idea of spectatorship as a description of the modes of
(potentially gendered) subjectivity proposed by the oper-
ations of the film text — the "spectator-in-the-text" — and
on the other, the idea of the social audience for films —
the actual people, male and female, who go to the
cinema.

It was a woman's picture that prompted a landmark
exploration by feminist critics of all these issues: film
texts, spectatorship, pleasure, genre, and gender. During
the 1980s, the 1937 Stella Dallas, arguably the founding
text of the classic maternal melodrama, was at the center
of an extended debate in which it was suggested, among
other things, that no identity can be assumed between a
present-day feminist reading of Stella Dallas and the
responses of female audiences in the 1930s. The debate
foundered at the point at which this question of the
social audience — and specifically the historical audience,
the women who saw Stella Dallas in the 1930s — was
raised, and this issue remained unresolved. The Stella
Dallas debate thus prefigured a key problem facing film
theory: the question of the function, and the address, of
popular culture — specifically of genres within main-
stream cinema — in relation to audiences, both past and
present, male and female. What is the relationship

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Woman's Pictures

Ann Blyth, Zachary Scott, and Joan Crawford in the maternal melodrama, Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

between the modes of subjectivity proposed by the wom-
an's picture and the female audiences to which these
films were marketed? How does the woman in the cin-
ema audience, as a social subject, negotiate meanings
proposed in the rhetoric of the film text?

GENRE, THE WOMAN'S PICTURE, AND
THE FEMALE AUDIENCE

In its time, the Hollywood woman's picture was deliber-
ately targeted at female audiences, and not just in terms
of the films' "female-centered" subject matter and
address. In fact, as Maria LaPlace contends, the textual
attributes of the woman's picture draw on a wider wom-
en's culture, linking women's consumption of commod-
ities with the commodification inherent in the star
system. This, she argues, created a symbolic system in

which women could try to make sense of their lives and
perhaps even create imaginative space for resistance."

Thinking about the woman's picture as a genre, in
other words, calls for conceptualizing films — texts — as
nodes in a whole network of cultural phenomena that
may include, for example, women's popular fiction,
Hollywood studios' production practices (such as, say,
scriptwriting), and the Hollywood star system, through
to broader cultures of consumerism and femininity. The
distinctive features of the woman's picture as a
Hollywood genre of a certain period are shaped through
its combination of historically-specific textual, intertex-
tual and contextual attributes.

LaPlace tests this approach in a study of Now,
Voyager (1942), a film based on the best-selling 1941
novel of the same name by Olive Higgins Prouty and

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371

Woman 's Pictures

starring Bette Davis as an embittered, unattractive
woman who eventually breaks free of the thrall of a
domineering mother and finds a man she can love,
settling finally for something less than the conventional
happy ending. Drawing on a range of nonfilmic source
materials, including studio pressbooks, fan magazines,
film posters, and studio production files, LaPlace shows
how, in the 1940s, this film participated in, and contrib-
uted to, cultures of femininity and consumerism.
Through its particular intertexts of production and con-
sumption, the woman's picture constructs cultures of
femininity and consumerism.

This kind of study of the genre can be productively
extended to take in the films' reception by real-life audi-
ences as well — an approach that may demand attention
to an even wider range of phenomena and source materi-
als. A crude measure of a film's popularity can be readily
obtained from box-office statistics, while the tone of
critical and film industry responses can be gauged from
contemporary reviews. So, for example, in a study of the
production context and intertexts of Mildred Pierce,
Albert LaValley notes that, while the film was a huge
financial success on its release, it was far from being a hit
with critics, who dubbed it a "tortured drama" and
"another tear-sodden story of Mother Love" (pp. 50-51).
The gulf between critics and box office neatly sums up
the conundrum of the woman's picture: denigrated for its
overemotional (that is, feminine) preoccupations and
tone, it is also an immense draw for filmgoers.

How did contemporary audiences experience and
relate to the woman's picture? The answer to this ques-
tion remains something of an enigma. From the content
and address of the films, from the ways they were mar-
keted and promoted, from reviews, and even from box-
office statistics, conjectures can readily be advanced. But
even so, the actual experience of female audience mem-
bers at the time is elusive. Sources of data are often
patchy, inaccessible, difficult to interpret, unreliable, or
simply nonexistent. Consequently, there are few in-depth
accounts of historical audiences' responses to particular
films or genres, while the creation of new data in this area
is beset by numerous methodological, conceptual, and
practical pitfalls.

Nonetheless, a few attempts in this direction have
been made, including Jackie Stacey's Star Gazing (1994),
a study conducted in the 1990s of British women's
memories of cinemagoing in the 1940s and 1950s, and
Helen Taylor's Scarlett's Women (1989), based on ethno-
graphic research with fans of Gone With the Wind, in
both novel (1936) and film (1939) forms. However,
neither takes the woman's picture as its focus: Stacey is
concerned more broadly with the female social audience,
Taylor with a highly distinctive variant of audience

involvement — fandom — and with a film that, by any
version of the accepted definition, cannot be regarded
as a woman's picture. Therefore, we know very little in
any depth about the audience for woman's pictures at the
time; consequently, there is ample scope for research in
this area.

At the same time, however, social and cultural his-
torians have achieved rather greater success in under-
standing the woman's picture as a form of popular
culture and in assessing it in the context of women's
history. The 1940s, the heyday of the woman's picture,
was a crucial decade for women, in the United States as
in many other parts of the world. In relation to the
United States, for example, Andrea Walsh (1984) notes
that in 1942 eleven million men left for war, the women
they left behind took up new and challenging roles at
home and at work. When they came back, the GIs found
America was a transformed country. Its women had
matured and expanded their horizons; and Hollywood
was part of this female story of residual and emergent
cultural currents.

Against this background, we can see how the 1940s
woman's picture, in a key moment in women's twenti-
eth-century history, enacts and constructs a struggle
between female independence on the one hand and desire
for security in home and family on the other. It is
illuminating to note, for instance, that Mildred Pierce
was released in the autumn of 1945, just as soldiers were
returning home from war, at a time when a large number
of working women felt guilty and confused regarding
their new roles. As Walsh notes, Mildred's ambiguous
reunion with her husband "might be seen as a parallel to
that of the war wife and her GI mate" (p. 131).

Studies in cultural history such as Walsh's aspire to
be sensitive to the historical realities of the moment in
which the woman's picture flourished as well as to the
situation of its original audience, without lapsing into
simplistic notions about films reflecting reality. In con-
junction with work on texts, spectatorship, intertexts, and
audiences, this sort of approach sheds light on the wider
social and cultural factors involved in the rise of the
woman's picture, and indeed in its demise, and lends
depth to our understanding of the continuing transfor-
mation and hybridization of this important film genre.

SEE ALSO Gender; Genre; Fans and Fandom; Feminism;
Melodrama; Psychoanalysis; Reception Theory;
Spectatorship and Audiences

FURTHER READING

Cook, Pam. "Duplicity in Mildred Pierce." In Women in Film
Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 68-82. Revised ed. London:
British Film Institute, 1998.

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Woman's Pictures

. "Melodrama and the Women's Picture." In

Gainsborough Melodrama, edited by Sue Aspinall and Robert
Murphy, 14-28. London: British Film Institute, 1983.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman 's Film of the
1940s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Harper, Sue, and Vincent Porter. "Moved to Tears: Weeping in
the Cinema in Postwar Britain." Screen 37, no. 2 (1996):
152-173.

Kuhn, Annette. "The Stella Dallas Debate." In Women's Pictures:
Feminism and Cinema, 209-21 4. 2nd edition. New York,
London: Verso, 1994.

LaPlace, Maria. "Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film:
Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager." In Home Is Where the
Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman 's Film, edited
by Christine Gledhill, 138-166. London: British Film
Institute, 1987.

La Valley, Albert J. Mildred Pierce. Madison, WI: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1980.
Metz, Christian. "The Imaginary Signifier." In his Psychoanalysis

and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, 1-87. London:

Macmillan Press, 1982.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen

16, no.3 (1975): 6-18.
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female

Spectatorship . New York, London: Routledge, 1994.
Taylor, Helen. Scarlett's Women: "Gone with the Wind" and Its

Female Fans. London: Virago Press, 1989; New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Walsh, Andrea S. Women's Film and Female Experience,
1940-1950. New York: Praeger, 1984.

Annette Kuhn

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WORLD WAR I

Although not the fitst conflict to touch cinema, the Great
War, from August 1914 to November 1918, was unpre-
cedented in scale. The visual power of film, combined
with the aural suggestiveness of music, endowed cinema
with a unique social function during the war. In both
documentary and fiction, the war rallied the film indus-
try to produce mass entertainment, education, and, of
course, propaganda, as the industry fell under increasing
government control. By the end of the war, cinema had
achieved prestige as an art form appealing to the middle
classes through the new picture palaces. In Europe, how-
ever, the conflict placed previously dominant national
cinemas such as those of France and Italy in stasis, in
some cases never to recover. Others, such as those of
Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia, found the
blockade of foreign imports surprisingly fortuitous in
fostering distinctive new cycles of production.

PEACE OR PREPAREDNESS?

In the period of early cinema, the United States was
primarily concerned with its domestic market, but from
1909 the commercial advantage of exporting film over-
seas became clear. Although Hollywood had successfully
exported before 1914, the dominance it achieved a few
years later was made possible by the war. France had been
the world leader in film export, with Italy and Denmark
close behind; indeed, France had been at the forefront of
cinema's development, with pioneering filmmakers such
as Georges Melies (1861-1938) and the Lumiere broth-
ers (Auguste Lumiere [1862-1954] and Louis Lumiere
[1864—1948]) and the world's number one film pro-
ducer, Pathe. But when Pathe made an ill-timed move
to concentrate on US distribution rather than produc-

tion, France's grip on its internal market slipped, allow-
ing 50 percent of films shown in 1917 to be American.
In addition, the French film industry, like that of Italy
when it entered the war in 1917, suffered from the
shutdown of all cinemas and productions during the first
months of the war. Once Hollywood's international dis-
tribution moved from London to New York, US film
companies began to gain control of foreign distribution
to Latin America and the Far East. The dwindling supply
of film stock exacerbated problems facing the European
film industry and affected others as far away as China.
Suddenly an enlarged export market granted Hollywood
more reliable profit margins; hence film budgets
increased, giving Hollywood's often powerfully escapist
product added international appeal. With Europe dis-
tracted, Hollywood began to organize its various inde-
pendent studios into the vertically integrated industry
that emerged after the war. By 1919 five major studios
were in place: Universal (1912), Warner Bros. (1913),
Paramount (1914), Fox (1915), and United Artists
(1919), as well as the three component companies of
MGM (1914-1917).

With the declaration of war in Europe, US opinion
was divided, not least because it had close ethnic ties with
all the parties involved. Despite calls from the United
Kingdom and France for support, President Woodrow
Wilson (1856-1924) chose neutrality over intervention
and continued trade with the belligerent powers against a
rising tide of attacks on American shipping. The first prop-
aganda film to call for US intervention was J. Stuart
Blackton's (1875-1941) The Battle Cry for Peace
(1915). The oxymoronically titled film warned against
complacency by depicting the destruction of major

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American cities after the lowering of national defenses.
The film received silent backing from the arms manufac-
turer Hudson Maxim.

Films calling for "peace" included Herbert Brenon's
War Brides, based on the emotive vaudeville "playlet" by
Marion Craig Wentworth and released in November
1916. Although set in an imaginary kingdom, the film
was pointedly contemporary in showing its heroine com-
mit suicide rather than bear children to be sacrificed in
future battles. As an answer to Blackton's film, Thomas
Ince's (1882-1924) celebrated Civilization (1916), under
the advertising slogan "PEACE — The Battle Cry of
Civilization," was another allegorical narrative with a
war-mongering king. The king directs the engineer
Count Ferdinand to wage submarine war — plainly refer-
encing the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania — before the
count converts to pacifism and sacrifices himself and his
ship. After the count's resurrection to spread the message
of peace, the king witnesses a vision of Christ foretelling
the horrors of war, an image that borrows from the
semireligious postcards popular during the war. This
spiritualist iconography was highly influential on film
both during and after the war, as evident, for example,
in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), as the
ghostly "resurrection" of Rudolph Valentino's soldier
returns to his grieving wife.

"DO YOUR BIT FOR AMERICA"

The United States entered the war on 5 April 1917.
President Wilson called on everyone to "Do Your Bit
for America," and this included the film industry. At
every level — helping with recruitment and fund-raising,
making training films as well as inspirational fiction
features featuring charismatic movie stars — cinema
worked to align the nation to the political and social
needs of the day. Producers, distributors, and exhibitors
developed an approach of "practical patriotism," finding
that business and patriotism could be mutually benefi-
cial. The public was encouraged to attend not only for
entertainment, but to participate in sweepstakes to win
Liberty Bonds, thus offering the incentive of indirectly
lining the pockets of Uncle Sam. Although only a minor-
ity of features directly referenced the war itself, the num-
ber of war-themed films increased over the course of the
war, from eight in May 1917, when public opinion was
predominantly antiwar, to fifty-four (many of which
were prestige productions) at the time of the Armistice
in August 1918.

Cinemas were frequently decked out with bunting or
portraits of President Wilson to spark patriotic interest,
while the singing of the national anthem and other
patriotic songs, slide shows of local enlisted men, public
lectures on war topics, and even the raising of colossal

flags at every show fostered feelings of collective identity.
For the third Liberty Loan campaign, the National
Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI)
distributed a film by Douglas Fairbanks (1918, 'Sic
'Em Sam') and over 17,000 advertising trailers and post-
ers. NAMPI, established in July 1916, regulated the
various sectors of the film industry and in May 1917
formed a War Cooperation Committee to further the
interests of both the industry and the government. The
Committee was advised on the latest guidelines on mat-
ters such as food conservation, and produced campaigns
and short propaganda films. The studios sent out stars
such as Mary Pickford (1892-1979) and Charlie Chaplin
(1889-1977) to address the public while its members
were attached to key departments and divisions of gov-
ernment and the armed forces. On 28 April 1917 Motion
Picture News proudly reported that the serial queen Pearl
White (1889-1938) had ridden a steel beam to the
twentieth story of a New York building, unfurled an
American flag in the breeze, and called for all young
men to enlist.

The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was
formed in April 1917, with the journalist George Creel as
chairman, and with the Secretaries of State, War, and
Navy as members. It functioned to sustain voluntary
censorship and oversee the making, distribution, and
exhibition of propaganda films, particularly through its
control of export licenses. Thus if an overseas territory
were found to be exhibiting German material, the threat
of withholding the more popular American films could
be used to gain cooperation. Additionally, 20 percent of
any shipment of entertainment film had to consist of
"educational" material. Although the committee's remit
included "motion picture films and photographs," a new
Division of Films was created in September that year.
The eminent American critic W. Stephen Bush wrote to
the British trade journal The Bioscope on 19 May 1917,
describing his efforts to organize motion picture exhib-
itors across the southern states into "keeping the flame of
patriotism burning brightly." Adding to the motivation
behind such efforts were fears that Texas would become a
"second Belgium" if Germany executed plans to invade
from Mexico, whose civil war until then had been com-
peting with the European war for US headlines.

Although the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation
would not permit Cecil B. DeMille to travel to Europe
to visit the front lines, D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) was
granted statesmanlike authority there to shoot Hearts of
the World (1918). The film, partly financed by the British
government, told the story of a small French village beset
by war; the crew made much-publicized visits to the
trenches in France to record real-life action scenes that
would be intercut with reconstructions. Billed as "A Love
Story of the Great War," it became one of biggest films

376

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of the period. In April 1918, a month after the premiere
of Hearts of the World, the historian Francis Trevelyan
Miller wrote to Griffith, hailing him as "the Greatest of
War Historians." On 5 April 1918 the New York Times
reported that, when the film was shown to an invited
Broadway audience of critics and servicemen, the pastoral
scenes before the coming of the war registered the most
profoundly: "the theatre broke into applause just at some
particularly beautiful landscape of rural vista." Making
the film's propaganda angle clear, at the end of the
screening Griffith himself stood to give a short speech,
broken with emotion. The crowd then cheered footage of
British and French leaders, whereas a "representation of
the Kaiser was eagerly hissed." The following month
Griffith, as president of the new Motion Picture War
Service Association, was charged with the task of boost-
ing the US war effort through sales of war bonds.
However, the film was not as big a success as the
British government had hoped. Audiences had grown
tired of war films of any kind and instead sought infor-
mation from newsteels. Hearts of the World was rereleased
with a revised ending as a "peace edition" in 1919.

BRITAIN PREPARED

In the United Kingdom the need to continue with every-
day life resulted in a business-as-usual approach by cin-
ema managers, echoing the practical patriotism of the
United States. In British theaters during the winter of
1915, audiences of uniformed men laughed at the broad
comedy of pantomime one moment and sang melan-
choly war anthems, such as "Keep the Home Fires
Burning," the next; in similar fashion, cinema's blend
of reality with escapism was readily accepted. Movie
theaters accommodated audiences seeking refuge from
cold homes, offering an evening's entertainment and of
course information about the war. They also raised funds
for the war effort, as on Cinema Day, 9 November 1915,
when the day's box-office takings were presented to the
king and used to purchase fifty ambulances. Like the slide
shows in the United States, local theaters also screened
"Roll of Honor" films, greeted with both cheers and tears
for those lost or wounded "over there." Many local
scenes were particularly poignant. One film shown at
the Imperial War Museum, London, specially shot for
locals at the Tivoli Cinema in Grimsby, featured the
"chums" of the Tenth Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment
in training. The patrons were most likely unaware, when
the film was shown on 4 July 1916, that the battalion
had been wiped out on the first day of the Battle of the
Somme three days earlier.

After protracted negotiations with the War Office,
the first official propaganda film, Britain Prepared, was
shown on 29 December 1915, complete with sequences

in Kinemacolor, the world's first "natural" color process.
Despite support from former President Theodore
Roosevelt (1858—1919) and US government officials
along with the Patriotic Film Corporation, the director
Charles Urban faced significant opposition in America
when promoting the film there because of its prepared-
ness message. The first two official cameramen were also
dispatched to the front at this time, and their first foot-
age, screened early the next year, complemented the
domestic character of "Topical Budget" shorts until that
point. Initial objections to filming the conflict were
driven by a distaste for what some saw as the working-
class nature of cinema — thus lacking the sophistication
appropriate to the endeavor — and the belief that tight
media control had aided the Japanese during the Russo-
Japanese war of 1904-1905. In February 1918 Pictorial
News ( Official), under the auspices of Lord Beaverbrook's
(1879-1964) Ministry of Information (MOI), replaced
the "Topical" shorts. During the war 240 films and 152
issues of the official newsreel were released.

Film screenings, often amid the ruins of barns and
outbuildings, became an increasingly popular entertain-
ment among both Allied and German forces toward the
end of the war. The British Mobile Cinema Unit, headed
by Major A. C. Bromhead, brought films to audiences of
up to nine thousand servicemen and women, with screen-
ings projected using searchlight dynamos onto mobile,
two-sided screens that toured around the four fronts of
the war during 1916 and 1917. Smaller gatherings took
place at hospitals, and footage was recut for different
local audiences. Beaverbrook appeared in one edition of
the newsreel Pictorial News (April 1918) inspecting a fleet
of ten "Cine Motor-Cars," which were to be dispatched
to "depict war truths in the villages." Under
Beaverbrook, the style of Pictorial News films developed
into a much more sophisticated and efficient narrative,
with improved intertitles and more dynamic editing.
Popular stars such as Ivy Close (1890—1968) were fea-
tured in shorts such as Women's Land Army (1917), call-
ing for volunteers while declaring "weeds, like U-Boats,
must be exterminated!" as female workers are superim-
posed on the cornfields before the image of Britannia
appears at the end to pay tribute to her "toiling sisters."
Films in other countries made use of similar tableaux,
appropriating suitably iconic and relevant figures such as
Joan of Arc. Cecil B. DeMille's (1881-1959) epic Joan
the Woman (1917), for example, presented Joan as a
transnational figure of unity and reconciliation for
French, British, and American troops through a framing
narrative set in a World War I trench.

The landmark British film of the period, however,
was The Battle of the Somme (1916), the first and most
successful of the three official "battle" features produced
between summer 1916 and spring 1917 and one of the

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KING VIDOR

b. King Wallis Vidor, Galveston, Texas, 8 February 1894, d. 1 November 1982

In a film career whose durability was unrivalled by almost
any other director, by the early 1 920s King Vidor had
developed a reputation as a morally earnest director of
meaningful, atmospheric pictures about ordinary people in
extraordinary and often hostile environments.

Vidor's early years were steeped in the movies. As a
teenager he filmed footage for the Mutual Weekly newsreels
of US troops sent to the border during the Mexican civil
war. He continued to sell material on a piecemeal basis
while working as a clerk at Universal, submitting scripts
under the pseudonym Charles Wallis. Vidor gained
recognition writing and directing independent features with
The Turn in the Road and The Other Half (both 1919),
starring his wife, Florence. After short contracts with First
National and building his own small studio, Vidor Village,
which closed in 1922, Vidor worked separately with Louis
B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn before working under the
new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in 1924, a relationship
that would last twenty years. By turning down Ben-Hur
(1925), Vidor was able to direct the World War I epic The
Big Parade (1925). With a budget of $245,000, it is
estimated to have made over $ 1 5 million in a few years at a
time when few films made over a tenth of that. The film
consolidated his reputation for working to erode social
barriers through powerful images of ordinary people, as
with the character played by James Murray in The Crowd
(1928), the film that earned the director the first of six
Academy Award® nominations during his career.

Vidor's first sound film was the all-black musical
drama, Hallelujah (1929). During the Depression, his
socially aware film Our Daily Bread (1934) called for
cooperative living. His "war, wheat, and steel" trilogy was
completed with An American Romance ( 1 944) . After a few
formula features Vidor was on form again, with the
celebrated melodrama Stella Dallas (1937) and The Citadel

(1938), a British film set in a Welsh mining town. In 1939
Vidor spent three weeks on the troubled shoot of The
Wizard of Oz, notably directing the "Somewhere Over the
Rainbow" sequence, one of cinema's most poignant
expressions of personal isolation and the desire to escape.
Duel in the Sun (1946), a huge hit, is a gloriously lurid
western with an all-star cast.

In the 1950s he made fewer films; his epic Italian-
American co-production War and Peace (1956) brought
Oscar® recognition once again, but his directorial career
ended with Solomon and Sheba (1959). In 1979 Vidor was
recognized with an honorary Academy Award® for
"incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and
innovator."

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Jack Knife Man (1920), Peg o' My Heart (1922), The Big
Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Hallelujah (1929), The
Champ (1931), Our Daily Bread (1934), Stella Dallas
(1937), Northwest Passage (1940), Duel in the Sun (1946),
The Fountainhead (1949), Ruby Gentry (1952), Man
Without a Star (1955)

FURTHER READING

Baxter, John. King Vidor. New York: Monarch Press. 1976.

Dowd, Nancy, and David Shepard, interviewers. King Vidor.
Hollywood, CA: Director's Guild of America; Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.

Schickel, Richard. The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews
with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred
Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh and
William A. Wellman. New York: Atheneum, 1975.

Vidor, King. A Tree Is a Tree. New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1953.

. King Vidor on Film Making. New York: McKay,

1972.

Michael Williams

most successful and influential British films ever made.
An estimated twenty million people saw the film within
six weeks of its August release and the majority of the
population soon after. Having the biggest impact in 1916
were sequences (subsequently believed to have been simu-
lated) of men forsaking safety by going over the top of

the trenches to engage the enemy (the origin of the idiom
"over the top") and lingering images of the British and
German dead. Audiences were shocked by the film's
uncompromising images of war. The Battle of the
Somme was shown around the world; in Canada, where
the Department of Militia and Defense had called for

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King Vidor. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

certain images to be censored early in 1915, some scenes
of warfare were cut.

After The Battle of the Somme, Griffith's The Birth of
a Nation (1915) was the most significant film of the
period for British audiences. The film was shown only
in theaters and not cinemas, sparking debate among
exhibitors, who felt they were being squeezed out because
the theater showings attracted a middle-class clientele
that did not normally frequent the cinema.

Both Allied and German governments had interests
in influencing the populations of neutral countries
through control of exhibition venues, particularly in
Holland and Switzerland and also across Scandinavia.
In February 1918 the Societe Suisse d'Exploitation des
Films, effectively a field outpost of the CPI, warned
Washington that German agents were penetrating the
best picture-houses in the larger cities of Switzerland
and sent back black lists of firms trading with
Germany. The Societe attempted to screen war films on
behalf of the Allies, with some success in that The Battle
of the Somme was seen by some 75,000 Swiss. The
American CPI and British MOI formed a joint company
to ensure that a sympathetic cinema, exclusively showing

American, British, and French films, could be established
in each major city in the country. The two bodies dis-
cussed whether the company should attempt to block all
German product but agreed on a ratio of one-third
German to two-thirds Allied. At the same time, material
exported to such sensitive destinations was to be carefully
censored so as not to play into enemy hands. For exam-
ple, a commissioner warned the War Trade Board that
Spanish audiences had interpreted one Pathe film as an
accurate picture of life in New York, inadvertently serv-
ing as propaganda for the Germans.

EUROPE

Given its supremacy before the war, French cinema was
perhaps the hardest hit in Europe. After the initial clo-
sure, cinema-going actually boomed in France during the
war, theaters and other entertainment venues having been
closed for the duration. As there was insufficient French
material to screen, Hollywood imports, particularly
adventure serials, began to dominate, as did their
European imitations. As in the United Kingdom, author-
ities were slow to produce war material for the screen. It
was left to private producers to gather material until the
beginning of 1915, when an agreement was reached with
the War Ministry allowing them to continue filming
under supervision, resulting in more than five hundred
shorts, particularly the official newsreel War Annals; from
1917 this newsreel was also distributed in Britain with
bilingual intertitles. From January 1917 an Army
Cinema Section produced all footage, which all cinemas
were obliged to screen. A new generation of French
directors emerged in August 1918, among them Abel
Gance (1889-1981), who was granted permission to
shoot footage of battle scenes for his acclaimed antiwar
feature J'accuse! (1919). Billed as "the most romantic
tragedy of modern times," the film tells the story of a
soldier, Jean Diaz, driven to the brink of insanity by the
memory of his comrades being slaughtered needlessly on
the eve of the Armistice. Gance powerfully conveys his
indignation at the loss of a generation that fell in battle
by showing the war dead rising from their graves to bear
witness to the living. Scenes of the real-life war injured
parading past the camera (Gance was supported by var-
ious veterans' organizations), presenting their disfigured
bodies and faces in stark close-up, are among the most
powerful images to come from the war.

Having led the way in screen epics just before the
war with films such as the internationally successful
Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), Italy set the standard
for fully realizing cinema's potential for visual spectacle
and technical virtuosity, matched only by Griffith's
Intolerance (1916). Only three months after Italy entered
the war in 1915, the release of Sempre nel cor la P atria!

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World War I

ABEL GANCE
b. Paris, France, 25 October 1889, d. 10 November 1981

Abel Gance was a pioneering and influential French
writer, director, and producer known for his visual
experimentation.

He made his screen debut in Moliere in 1 909, at the same
time reluctandy accepting a job in a law office and hoping to
make his mark on the stage. Struggling through poverty and
illness, Gance set up a production company in 1911, and that
year directed his first film, La Digue. Kept out of the war by
continued illness, Gance achieved renown for his innovative
optical effects (it is said that he introduced the close-up to
French cinema) and mobile camera work as a director for the
Film d'Art company with Mater dolorosa ( The Torture of
Silence, 1917) and La Dixieme symphonie {The Tenth
Symphony, 1918). These films were commercial and artistic
successes, despite the concerns of his management that his
visionary camera techniques were outlandish.

The most celebrated period of Gance's career began
with his acclaimed antiwar feature /'accuse! (L Accuse,
1919), which was a hit across Europe and in the United
States. After the death of his wife from influenza, Gance
traveled to the United States to recover from his loss while
also promoting /'accuse! across the nation. Despite the
admiration of D. W. Griffith and the offer of a contract
from Metro, Gance returned to France. His next film, La
Roue (The Wheel, 1923), the story of a railway mechanic,
won acclaim and would later be cited as an influence by
both Jean Cocteau and Akira Kurosawa.

The six-hour Napoleon (1927), displaying technical
virtuosity, is Gance's masterpiece. The film mustered a
cast of thousands, choreographed across a panoramic
screen. Gance's Polyvision triptych process involved the
simultaneous projection of three adjacent cameras to
produce often startling montage effects when presented in
suitably equipped theaters. As with /'accuse!, which Gance

reworked into a new sound version in 1938, the director
obsessively revisited Napoleon throughout his lifetime, first
adding stereo sound effects in 1934. The director's belief
in the Polyvision format remained undiminished into the
1950s, its effect akin to the counterpoint of Greek tragedy,
the emotional shock involving the spectator in the film
experience.

Gance founded Les Films Abel Gance in 1933 but
achieved little autonomy in his work and relied on
international backing. Gance's early sound work affected
his later reputation, not least because French critics were
largely unsympathetic to silent directors who attempted to
make the transition into sound. However, in 1979
Napoleon was meticulously restored and screened in
London and then New York in its original format and
with a new score. Living just long enough to witness the
critical acclaim that ensued, Gance could be satisfied that
his reputation, particularly in France, was finally being
restored.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

As Director: Mater Dolorosa (1917), La Dixieme symphonie
(1918), /'accuse! ( 1 9 1 9) , La Roue (1923), Napoleon ( 1 927) ,
Le Fin du monde (End of the World, 1931), Un grand
amour de Beethoven ( The Life and Loves of Beethoven,
1936), /'accuse! (1938), Cyrano et d'Artagnan (1963); As
Writer: La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1954)

FURTHER READING

Kaplan, Nelly. Napoleon. London: British Film Institute,

1994.

King, Norman. Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle. London:
British Film Institute, 1984.

Kramer, Steven Philip, and James Michael Welsh. Abel
Gance. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Michael Williams

(My Country is Always in my Heart, Carmine Gallone,
1915) marked the beginnings of the popular patriotic
genre. Depicting an Italian woman's heroic self-sacrifice,
the film gained a realistic sense of destruction from being
filmed amid the recently earthquake devastated region of
Abruzzo. Increased censorship of the harsher images of
the war facilitated the blending of patriotic with fantas-

tical elements and collectivity being individualised into
the heroic struggle of enduring popular heroes and war-
rior imagery that would be appropriated by the Fascist
party after the war. Machiste alpino (1916) brought the
superhuman Machiste of Cabiria returned to the screen
to join the war effort. Comedies and epics were produced
alongside more overtly propagandistic features such as

380

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Abel Gance. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

La guerra e il sogno di Momi {Momi's Dream and the War,
Segundo De Chomon, 1917), in which a young boy,
after reading letters from the front, dreams of a war
fought by puppets and of saving his father, whom he
finds has returned upon waking. Another propaganda
tale, Come mori Miss Cavell, related the cause celebre of
Germany's execution of English nurse Edith Cavell in
1915. The emotive theme was also exploited by other
nations, such as the British Nurse and Martyr (Percy
Moran, 1915) and US The Woman the Germans Shot
(John G. Adolfi, 1918), while the death of a Belgian
nurse, Gabrielle Petit, was depicted for the first Belgian
war film to be made after the war, La Belgique martyre
{The Martyrdom of Belgium, Charles Tutelier, 1919). At
the end of the war, despite strong production and the
foundation of the Unione Cinematographica Italiana,
Italian film was now behind changed international tastes.

In Germany the cinema initially was deemed to be a
lower form of art than theater, and thus the export market
was undeveloped. However, the industry was expanding as
the war began, not least because of the huge popularity of
stars such as Henny Porten and the Danish Asta Nielsen.
Indeed, there was a strong link between those two countries.
Before the outbreak of the war, neutral Denmark's Nordisk

was the world's second-largest producer of films, with dis-
tribution networks spanning the globe from Russia across
Europe to the United States. However, as the company
owned profitable first-run theaters within Germany — of
which the German government would soon seize control,
buying out its German subsidiary, Nordische Film GmbH,
to set up Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) — its
exports were deemed part-German and banned from many
markets, from November 1915 including the United
Kingdom, soon joined by France and Italy. The October
Revolution in Russia in 1917 blocked further trade, leaving
Scandinavia as the main remaining market. Denmark's
increasing isolation prevented contact with developments
elsewhere in film art, while dwindling production left only
two of six film companies at the end of the war.

The private German firms Eiko and Messter-Film had
produced newsreels from the start of the war, partly work-
ing as a consortium with other German companies. These
were subsumed within the civilian Deulig (Deutsche
Lichtbild Gessellschaft) company in 1916, promoting
German culture and economic interests around the world.
It was not until January 1917 that the German government
established the military-controlled Bild-und Film-Amt
(BUFA), charged with oversight of propaganda matters.
Germany's isolation during the war resulted in increased
domestic production, and the next step in the consolidation
of production and state interest was to subsume BUFA into
Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) in December
1917 with 25 million marks of state capital, with the aim
of deploying film to facilitate German success in the war.
Ufa was built up from smaller companies, with production
based at Babelsberg. This move anticipated that, at the end
of the war, as a private enterprise Ufa would adopt a
strategy of vertical integration under the leadership of
Erich Pommer (1889-1966) and thus achieve dominance
over the market. During the Weimar Republic (1919-
1933), the company would benefit from an influx of tal-
ented artists from the former Austro-Hungarian empire
and Russia, producing one of the most artistically dynamic,
and internationally influential, cinemas in film history.

In Russia the borders closed to imports as the coun-
try entered the war. As elsewhere, the imperial govern-
ment prohibited cameras from filming the actual conflict
until late in 1916. However, cinema became the most
popular form of entertainment, with 150 million movie
tickets sold in 1916 alone. Despite a shortage of raw
stock for filmmaking, it could be said that World War I
saved Russia's indigenous film industry, as it did
Germany's. Whereas once screens had been dominated
by the French Pathe and Gaumont companies, from
1913 to 1916 the number of Russian firms making films
rose from eighteen to forty-seven. Russia's isolation
enabled a distinctive national style to emerge, parti-
cularly in melodrama. Stars such as Ivan Mozzhukhin

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(1889-1939) and Nathalie Lissenko (1886-1969)
became hugely popular, and directors such as Yevgeni
Bauer (1865—1917) produced work of world-class artistic
quality. The Bolshevik Revolution changed everything as
many personnel, including Mozzhukhin, fled the coun-
try. By 1919 the Russian industry was once again domi-
nated by imports from Europe and the United States,
with stars such as Charlie Chaplin becoming particularly
popular. In the 1 920s Vladimir Lenin's belief in cinema's
primary importance for agitation and propaganda ("agit-
prop"), as well as for entertainment, fostered an influen-
tial and politically engaged generation of filmmakers,
including Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), Dziga Vertov
(1896-1954), and V. I. Pudovkin (1893-1953).

AFTERMATH

With the 1920s came the jazz age, providing distractions
from events that for many were far from resolved. In

Germany the social and psychological trauma caused by
the war inspired the Expressionist movement.
Contemporary anxieties were played out in the distorted,
fantastical settings of films such as Das Kabinett des
Doktor Caligari {The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert
Wiene, 1920) and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922).
Although this style gave German films a distinctive
national aesthetic, their imagery haunted other films, as
in the labyrinthine sets of Universal's The Phantom of the
Opera (1925) and, as portrayed by the British star Ivor
Novello (1893-1951) (also the composer of the patriotic
war song "Keep the Homes Fires Burning"), the "horror-
haunted" protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger
(1927).

More explicit touches of the war came in King
Vidor's (1894-1982) landmark 1925 epic The Big
Parade. One of the film's most haunting sequences shows
a group of men slowly being picked off by German rifles

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as they march through a French forest. Instructing a
drummer to create a metronomic beat, the men pace in
a "ballet of death," an effect Vidor requested that cinema
managers reproduce during screenings. Although
acclaimed internationally for its visual virtuosity, some
British critics attacked the apparent unilateralism of the
film in excluding the British "Tommy"; however, its
commercial success was unprecedented. Paramount's
Wings (1927) also made a big impact on audiences,
who were by captivated by its realism, enhanced by
sound effects blasting from behind the screen and exten-
sive use of Magnascope. Paramount's Magnascope pro-
jection process, which effectively tripled the size of the
screen at key moments, was used for other war films,
including Wings, Old Ironsides (1926), the British drama
The Guns of Loos (1928) and All Quiet on the Western
Front (1930). The latter, Universale adaptation of the
best-selling 1929 German novel by Erich Maria
Remarque (1898-1970), was part of a wave of antiwar
narratives that appeared beginning in the late 1920s,
including two of Britain's most powerful and underrated
films of the early sound period, Tell England (1931) and
Journey's End (1930). A war veteran himself, James
Whale (1889-1957) directed the latter, both the original
stage play and the film based on it, establishing what has
been claimed as the missing link between the war and
Universal's horror pictures. Whale made Frankenstein a
year later, with its bleak landscape and the seemingly
shell-shocked gait of the monster, clearly influenced by
the war.

Cinema emerged from the war a mass cultural phe-
nomenon. The studio system was consolidated in
Hollywood and strengthened its grasp on world markets,
war conditions having precipitated the end of French
cinema's dominance and the rise of German cinema.
Although stars in each country had embedded themselves
as home-front personalities, an exodus of talent streamed
toward America, not least from France; the French come-
dian Max Linder (1883-1925) left for a $5,000 weekly
salary in Hollywood. Chaplin, whose comic Shoulder
Arms (1918), released shortly after the Armistice, was
now earning cinema's first million-dollar salary, a sign

of how times had changed. Whereas isolation had sup-
ported the independence of cinema in Sweden during the
war, the loss of directors Mauritz Stiller (1883-1928)
and Victor Sjostrom (1879-1960) to Hollywood after-
ward contributed to a fall in fortunes for Svenska, the
leading company. War narratives would resonate during
the interwar years on both an implicit and explicit level
in all forms of cultural production, particularly in the
1920s, when the images of the war continued to shape
cultural memory.

FURTHER READING

Brownlow, Kevin. The War, the West and the Wilderness. London:
Seeker and Warburg, 1979.

Campbell, Craig W. Reel America and World War I: A

Comprehensive Filmography and History of Motion Pictures in
the United States, 1914-1920. Jefferson, NC, and London:
McFarland, 1985.

DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World
War One. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Dibbets, Karel, and Bert Hogenkamp, eds. Film and the Tirst
World War. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995.

Hammond, Michael. The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the
Great War (1914-1918). Exeter, UK: University of Exeter
Press, 2006.

Kelly, Andrew. Cinema and the Great War. London and New

York: Routledge, 1997.
Paris, Michael, ed. The First World War and Popular Cinema.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the
World Market. London: British Film Institute, 1985.

Williams, Michael. Ivor Novello: A Screen Idol. London: British

Film Institute, 2003.
Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in

European Cultural History. Cambridge, UK and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Wood, Richard, ed. Film and Propaganda in America: A

Documentary History. Vol. 1: World War One. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1990.

Michael Williams

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WORLD WAR II

World War II began in 1939 and lasted until 1945.
Dividing the world between the Axis Powers —
Germany, Italy and Japan — and the Allies, led by the
United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, it was
fought over numerous theaters in Western and Eastern
Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, Africa and the Middle
East, and the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. The war
ended in Europe with the surrender of Germany on 8
May 1945 and in Asia when Japan surrendered on 15
August of the same year. More than fifty million people
died during World War II as the consequence of geno-
cidal acts such as the Holocaust, the US bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war's many military
confrontations — the bloodiest taking place on the Pacific
and European fronts.

The new technologies of war — atomic weaponry, jet
aircraft, radar — contributed to World War IPs effects on
both military and civilian populations. Film technologies
and film cultures likewise played significant roles.
Although films were made during World War I, for both
the Axis and Allied nations World War II was the first
truly cinematic war: lightweight 16mm equipment was
developed that gave unprecedented access to images of
combat; world leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin
Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf
Hitler all had personal projectionists who screened news-
reels and documentaries as well as fiction films. And for
both civilian and military populations on both sides of
the conflict, film educated and entertained, communi-
cated the progress of the war, and mobilized national
feeling, as both Allied and Axis nations embraced cinema
as a war industry.

FILM INDUSTRIES AND CULTURES
OF THE AXIS NATIONS

The Nazis took control of the German government in
1933. After their defeat in World War I and years of
economic depression, Germans were vulnerable to
Hitler's rhetoric of nationalism and racial purity, which
blamed Communists and Jews for Germany's social and
economic problems. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister
of propaganda, was keenly interested in cinema. He over-
saw the nationalization of the film industry, achieved
over the next decade by acquiring controlling interests
of German companies; in 1942 these holdings, as well as
those of the Austrian and Czechoslovakian national indus-
tries, were consolidated in the Nazi-owned and -directed
film company Ufa.

From 1933 onward, Goebbels took a personal inter-
est in film production and previewed every film released.
He consolidated governmental control further in 1936 by
limiting film imports and banning all film criticism. Film
criticism was replaced by Filmbeobachtung (film observa-
tion), wherein writers merely described content without
comment on the quality. In addition, Goebbels endea-
vored to remove all Jews from the industry, as well as
others with lives or beliefs unacceptable to Nazi ideology.
Both Jews and non-Jews fled the German film industry
in the 1930s.

Among those who sought refuge in Hollywood were
directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Robert Siodmak, Billy
Wilder, and Douglas Sirk and actor Conrad Veidt. Their
influence on Hollywood film was as varied as their indi-
vidual talents. But collectively, their impact was most
notable in the translation of German expressionist

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World War II

aesthetics to the American screen, particularly in those
adult thrillers that postwar French film critics would dub
films noirs for their characteristically dark worldview and
shadowy urban milieu. Billy Wilder directed one of the
first noirs, Double Indemnity (1944), whose charismatic
criminal couple, snappy dialogue, and stark visual style
were highly influential.

Despite Goebbels's fascination with and control over
film as a tool of indoctrination, most Nazi-produced
films were anodyne entertainment. They were so free of
overt political bias, in fact, that captured German films
were screened in the postwar Soviet Union as trophies of
victory, despite the sharp repression of most aspects of
public culture during the final years of Stalin's leadership.
But while screens were largely filled with the same com-
edies and musicals popular before the war, Germany also
produced propaganda films for domestic and interna-
tional distribution. In the early 1930s a number of fiction
films focused on the opposition of Nazis and

Communists, characterizing it as a generational struggle
in order to appeal to younger audiences. In Hitlerjunge
Quex {Hitler Youth Quex, 1933), for example, a boy joins
the Hitler youth despite the objections of his drunken
Communist father; when his unsavory family life is
replaced by the wholesome discipline of the Nazis, he
gains a new identity and a new focus for his loyalty.

German also produced propagandist documentaries.
Leni Riefenstahl directed the most famous of these,
Triumph des Willens {Triumph of the Will, 1935) and
Olympia {The Olympiad, 1936). Made to commemorate
the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in 1934, Triumph
of the Will was a major production, with sixteen camera
crews and sets designed to highlight Nazi power. It
celebrated Nazi iconography and rituals in sequences
marked by geometric precision and grandeur, its mod-
ernist aesthetic used to imagine the Nazi state as a beau-
tiful and powerful mechanism for war. Widely
distributed in Europe, Triumph of the Will was never

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shown in the United States, although a copy was held at
the Museum of Modern Art. Americans first saw excerpts
of Riefenstahl's film as sequences intercut into Frank
Capra's documentary series, Why We Fight (1942-
1944). Documenting the Olympic games in Berlin in
1936, Riefenstahl's Olympia was meant to demonstrate
both Germany's cooperation with — and its superiority
over — competing nations. However, stellar performances
by non-Aryans, such as the African American runner
Jesse Owens, qualified its ability to validate Nazi
ideology.

Shortly before Hitler announced publicly what he
termed the "final solution" to Germany's "Jewish prob-
lem" in 1941, Germany distributed some explicitly anti-
Semitic films. One of the most popular was the historical
epic, Jud Sufi (Jew Siiess, 1940). Its titular villain is a
Jewish businessman who corrupts and destroys all who
know him; in its climax he rapes the film's heroine and
tortures both her father and lover. After the war, its
director, Veit Harlan, would be the only Nazi filmmaker
charged and tried for war crimes. He was not convicted,
despite substantial evidence that the film was used to
undermine popular opposition to the Holocaust. Made
with the same purpose but with less box office success,
Der Ewige Jew [The Eternal Jew, 1940) was a pseudo-
documentary account of Jewish corruption and con-
spiracy throughout history. Alongside films that portrayed
Germany's enemies as worthy of complete annihilation
were those that promoted nationalism and militarism:
blut und boden (blood and soil) dramas. The most lavish
of these was the historical reconstruction, Kolberg (1945).
Also directed by Harlan, it was an epic account of
Prussian resistance to the French during the Napoleonic
Wars; Goebbels was especially interested in the project
and diverted Nazi troops from battle to work as extras in
the film. It was released in 1945, but Allied bombing of
Berlin prevented its being widely seen by German
audiences.

After Germany surrendered it was occupied by the
Four Powers — the United States, the Soviet Union,
Britain, and France. They confiscated film holdings and
decentralized the industry. Likewise, thanks to extensive
lobbying on the part of the Motion Picture Association
of America, the Occupation Statute of 1 949 that created
the Federal Republic of Germany also specified that no
import quotas would protect its cinema from foreign —
Hollywood — competition. Although there is some
debate over just how much of the West German market
Hollywood controlled after the war, it is clear that
Hollywood took the opportunity to continue those dis-
tribution strategies declared illegal within the United
States by the US Supreme Court's Paramount Decree
of 1948, making West Germany a significant source of
revenue. West German production was itself healthy but

somewhat lackluster until the 1960s, when a new gener-
ation of young filmmakers rejected the generic entertain-
ments of the past and called for a new German auteurist
cinema.

Unlike the German film industry, Italian cinema
during World War II remained for the most part pri-
vately funded. But Mussolini, like Hitler and Goebbels,
recognized the significance of cinema to his political
aims. His government provided support for production,
and he kept close watch on all films produced. The
majority of these, as in Germany, were pure entertain-
ment: romances, melodramas, and comedies. The values
of fascism were communicated primarily in historical
epics, such as 1860 (Gesuzza the Garibaldian Wife,
1934) and Scipione I'Africano (Scipio the African, 1937),
which provided opportunity to celebrate Italy's national
pride and military prowess; overtly political films, how-
ever, were rare. Two exceptions were films made in
honor of the Fascist Party's tenth anniversary: Camicia
Nera (The black shirt, 1933), which dramatized the rise of
fascism, and Vecchia Guardia {The Old Guard, 1934),
which recounts a violent confrontation between fascists
and socialists in 1922.

For the most part, mainstream Italian production
favored screen fantasies with glamorous settings and sit-
uations, including romantic comedies and so-called
"white phone" melodramas. The La Canzone dell'amore
(The song of love, 1930) is characteristic of those films
that set contemporary stories of emotional upheaval,
love, and loss in brightly lit modernist interiors. Critics
writing in journals such as Bianco e new {White and
Black) called for more realistic films to be made; in the
early 1940s the aesthetic direction of Italian cinema
began to shift. For example, Roberto Rossellini's docu-
mentary-influenced La Nave Bianca {The White Ship,
1942) anticipated neo realist cinema in its use of a hospi-
tal ship as its setting and medical corps staff and on-duty
naval officers as actors. Likewise, Luchino Visconti's
adaptation of James M. Cain's novel, The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1934), titled Ossessione (1943), uti-
lized regional settings and dialogue for its story of ill-
fated love.

In addition to such aesthetic innovations, develop-
ments in Italy's film industry during the war would
contribute to its postwar status in international film
culture. The Venice Film Festival, which was inaugurated
under Mussolini's leadership in 1932, became annual in
1935, was discontinued in 1942, and then revived in
1948 (it was interrupted by student protests in 1968; and,
between 1969 and 1979, editions were non-competitive),
would become a model for festivals begun in Cannes
and Edinburgh in 1946 as well as those established during
the 1950s in Berlin, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco,

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World War II

London, Moscow, and Barcelona. These festivals show-
cased postwar European cinema and were vital to the
development of an international art cinema. Also impor-
tant to Italy's postwar role in international film culture
was the development of Cinecitta. Located in the southern
part of Rome and designed to house all aspects of film-
making, it was officially opened by Mussolini in April
1937. During the war it was the hub of Italian produc-
tion. After the war, when Hollywood sought means to
profit abroad despite protective legislation that froze a
percentage of its assets, Italy's "Hollywood on the
Tiber" became a key site for international co-productions
and runaway productions.

On the Pacific front, World War II was shaped by
Japan's imperialist ambitions. First signaled by Japan's
invasion of Manchuria in 1932 and confirmed by its
invasion of China in 1937, those ambitions widened
following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to include
the entire Pacific as well as Southeast Asia.

With Japan's changing role on the world stage came
significant changes in its film culture. Its film industry
was one of the world's most successful and fully devel-
oped, largely consolidated in three vertically integrated
companies that collaborated with one another to keep
out competitors, including Hollywood. Yet despite the
fact that the Japanese industry was unusually successful at
competing with Hollywood, Hollywood film and film
culture, along with Western fashions, jazz music, and
modern dance styles, were important to the urban
Japanese of the 1930s. All of this changed, however,
when Japan joined the Axis Powers. Taking its cue from
the Nazi use of cinema as part of Germany's plan for
total war, Japan tightened its control over film content.
American music, dancing, and fashions were banned
from the screen; nationalist aims were given priority,
and a censorship office was created to ensure adherence
to new laws governing film content. Film's purpose was
no longer simply to entertain, but to accurately represent
Japanese national identity, values, and beliefs. In pursu-
ing this goal, censors were alert to any omission or
misrepresentation of Japanese culture. For instance,
Yasujiro Ozu was the highly successful director of shomin-
geki, stories of the everyday life of the lower classes. But
his script for Ochazuke no aji {Flavor of Green Tea Over
Rice, 1952) was rejected when he failed to include the
traditional meal of red rice that wives fed to husbands
departing for battle.

Japanese popular cinema of the 1930s included
action-packed historical films (the jidai-geki) as well as
a variety of genre films devoted to depicting contempo-
rary life (the gendai-geki). These continued to be made
but were increasingly directed toward the wartime goal of
heightening national pride. During the early war years,

the jidai-geki became less of an action genre and directed
more toward depicting the power and grandeur of
abstract values associated with military action, such as
honor, duty, and self-sacrifice, as in Abe ichizoku {The
Abe Clan, 1938). In the wartime epic Genroku
Chushingura {The 47 Ronin), released in two parts in
1941, Kenji Mizoguchi recasts the familiar story in such
a way that it focuses entirely on the nobility of sacrifice
rather than on violence. The jidai-geki only recovered its
fast-paced action orientation when young director Akira
Kurosawa made Sugata Sanshiro {Judo Saga) in 1943.

An important extension of the contemporary focus
of the gendai-geki came in the form of battle and home-
front films. Early war films such as Five Scouts {Gonin no
sekkohei, 1939) and Tsuchi to heitai {Mud and Soldiers,

1939) focused less on violence than on the more routine
aspects of battle, less on individual heroism than the
work of the collective, with a style reminiscent of news-
reel footage. But, significantly, representations of battle
changed as Japan's global role changed, and films became
more jingoistic after Pearl Harbor. Thus, the post- 1941
films Mother of the Sea (1942) and Rikugun {The Army,
1944) are marked by overt signs of national and militarist
pride — displays of armaments as well as literal and figu-
rative flag waving of various kinds. In these terms, the
bravura displays of nineteenth-century martial arts in
Sugata Sanshiro might be read as not only the result of
Kurosawa's auteurist tendencies — of which more would
be seen in the decades to follow — but also as a sign of
changing attitudes toward combat during the 1940s.

While war films depicted the changing attitude
toward militarism, home-front films consistently cele-
brated small victories of ordinary people who bear their
burdens with good cheer and unquenched patriotism, as
in Hideko no shasho-san {Hideko the Bus Conductress,
1941). As in the wartime cinemas of the United
States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union,
home-front films are often a site for female heroism.
However, distinct from those home-front films that
focus on romance or maternal affection as an adjunct
to or even a source of patriotic fervor for women,
Japanese home-front films tended to downplay all rela-
tionships in favor of that between the individual and the
nation. The exceptions were interethnic romance films,
such as the hugely popular China Nights {Shino no yoru,

1940) , which used heterosexual desire as a figure of
Japan's imperialist ambitions: against the backdrop of
war-torn Shanghai, a Chinese girl is rescued from squalor
by a handsome Japanese officer and transformed from a
headstrong and willful orphan to a dutiful — and typically
Japanese — wife.

Following the US bombing of Japan and its conse-
quent surrender in 1945, American forces occupied the

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devastated country under the command of General
Douglas MacArthur and his retinue, known as SCAP —
the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. With the
goal of remaking Japan in such a way that it would cease
to be a threat to Western democracies, SCAP was espe-
cially interested in the film industry as a purveyor of
cultural identity and as a potential tool for cultural
change. In addition to censoring what it considered
dangerous topics of militarism and nationalism in pre-
war and wartime film, SCAP encouraged film content
that it considered useful to the cause of democracy,
including screenplays supporting women's rights and
opposing militarism. Considered a significant aspect of
Japan's transformation, the film industry was supported
by the United States, although steps were taken to break
down its centralized character. A time of rapid change
and expansion, the decade of the 1950s is commonly
considered one of Japanese cinema's most successful, a
time when the domestic industry prospered despite the
hundreds of American films that flooded the market-
place. Certainly, it was an era when auteurs such as
Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi took their place as part
of an international art cinema.

FILM INDUSTRIES AND CULTURES

OF THE ALLIES: GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE,

AND THE USSR

Although the initial response to the outbreak of war in
Britain in 1939 was to close all cinemas, they soon
reopened and film attendance grew steadily throughout
the war years. In spite of shortages, the reduction of
studio space available for feature film production, and
increased taxation and the consequent increases in ticket
prices, World War II was a prosperous time for British
cinema.

General trends in film attendance were recorded in a
survey undertaken for the Ministry of Information called
The Cinema Audience, which showed that film out-
stripped newspapers and books in its ability to reach
large segments of the population. Thus, the ministry's
Films Division organized a program of both theatrical
and nontheatrical exhibition, utilizing commercial cin-
ema circuits as well as such other venues as churches,
canteens, and even railway stations.

Given that the ministry's purpose was propaganda
and information, most of the films commissioned by the
Films Division were documentaries, and its "five minute
films" were designed to fit easily into a program of feature-
film viewing. Their content varied from news to practical
information, as in When the Pie Was Opened (1941),
which used a variety of animation techniques to illustrate
a recipe for making vegetable pie. But the Films Division
also produced longer documentaries, such as what many

consider the definitive document of the blitz, the Crown
Film Unit's Fires Were Started (1943), directed by
Humphrey Jennings. In some cases, it even funded com-
mercial projects, such as Michael Powell's 49th Parallel
(1941), a film that explained "why we fight." Scripted by
Emeric Pressburger, it also explained — by bringing the war
to America's doorstep — why Americans, too, should fight:
a small band of Nazis stranded in Canada have a series of
ideologically charged encounters with a French-Canadian
trapper, an ethnically-German religious community, and
an English intellectual who studies Native American cul-
tures. In each encounter the opposition between democ-
racy and Nazi ideology is made clear. Featuring two
bankable British stars, Leslie Howard and Laurence
Olivier, as well as a strong dose of adventure, it made
top box office in Britain and abroad.

Following the bombing of British cities in 1940 and
1941, filmmakers called for fewer war films because they
believed that an exhausted public needed escape from
battle. In 1942 the Films Division issued a statement
regarding its willingness to balance production between
war films and other types of propaganda, provided that
the films produced were of a high quality and positively
represented the British identity and the democratic way
of life. Depictions of a popular war ensued, a war fought
on a variety of fronts by a variety of ordinary British
people. For example, The Foreman Went to France (1942)
and Millions Like Us (1943) depicted the wartime expe-
riences and contributions of factory workers.

The successes of wartime British cinema would carry
over into the early 1950s. After Powell and Pressburger's
success with 49th Parallel, they continued to work together;
one of their most popular wartime films was the portrait of
military heroism, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ( The
Adventures of Colonel Blimp, 1943). Still making films
together in the 1950s, they constituted one of the most
important creative collaborations in British cinema.

France was invaded by Germany in June 1940. The
Nazis occupied Paris while a right-wing French govern-
ment was established in Vichy. At the beginning of the
Occupation, all films screened for French audiences were
German productions. Some proved popular, including
the anti-Semitic Jud Sufi, but French audiences preferred
French films, so domestic production was resumed in
1941. The Germans invested heavily in France's film
industry, considering it both good diplomacy — to dem-
onstrate the benefits of cooperation — and an investment
in the future of a German-controlled European film
industry. In the absence of films from its main compet-
itor, Hollywood, French film enjoyed greater profits in
the Occupation era than it had garnered before the
invasion. Meanwhile, in the unoccupied zone, the
Vichy government formed the Comite d'Organisation

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World War II

FRANK CAPRA
b. Bisacquino, Sicily, Italy, 18 May 1897, d. 3 September 1991

One of the most famous directors of the studio era — and
one of the very few to have his name above the title —
Frank Capra is best remembered today for a series of
populist comedies he made in the 1930s, most notably
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941). Although
his career before that was both prolific and varied, the
comedies that pitted the little guy against corrupt
institutions struck a responsive chord with Depression-era
audiences.

Capra began his career in 1922, directing the
independent short Fultah Fisher's Boarding House.
Working his way into the industry, Capra became a
comedy writer for both Hal Roach, for some of his Our
Gang comedy shorts, and Mack Sennett, the recognized
master of slapstick comedy. Capra then worked on three
popular comedies starring the comedian Harold Lloyd,
including Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) and The Strong
Man (1926). But the pair parted ways when Lloyd decided
to direct his own films. In 1928 Harry Cohn, president of
Columbia Pictures, then a struggling studio, hired Capra
as a house director. Directing twenty-five films for the
studio over the next ten years, nine of which were made in
the first year alone, Capra rose to preeminence at
Columbia.

The early Columbia films were in a variety of genres,
but the perky comedy Platinum Blonde (1931), starring
Jean Harlow, was a defining point in Capra's career. The
film marked the first of eight collaborations with the
writer Robert Riskin. One of their collaborations, It
Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable as a
working class journalist and Claudette Colbert as a spoiled
socialist who find themselves thrown together on a road
trip adventure, swept the Oscars® and is recognized as one
of the prototypes of the screwball comedy genre.

When the United States entered World War II,
Capra joined the Army and produced a series of training

films, the most important of which are seven collectively
known as Why We Fight (1943-1945). Because Capra's
Hollywood comedies were on one level entertaining pro-
American propaganda, he proved adept at more overt
political propaganda, bringing together a variety of
cinematic techniques, clever editing, and a sure-handed
manipulation of cultural iconography to sway Americans
from their earlier isolationist stance and to motivate
soldiers for battle.

After the war Capra's vision just as quickly seemed
out of date, and he lost step with audiences. His later films
failed to capture the success of his prewar work. Capra's
major postwar film, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), reveals
the director's loss of idealism and faith in the common
man, as it requires the divine intervention of an angel to
restore the hero's faith in American tradition and the

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932), The Bitter
Tea of General Yen (1933), It Happened One Night (1934),
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe
(1941), Why We Fight, 1: Prelude to War (1943), Why We
Fight, 2: The Nazis Strike (1943), Why We Fight, 3: Divide
and Conquer (1943), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Know
Your Enemy: Japan (1945), It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

FURTHER READING

Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography.

New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank

Capra. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1986.
Glatzer, Richard, and John Raeburn, eds. Frank Capra: The

Man and His Films. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1975.

McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Barry Keith Grant

de l'lndustrie Cinematographique (COIC) in 1940 to
control film production. Both the scope of the COIC's
distribution and its funding were limited, although it
received support from the United States and Italy.

In both the Vichy and German zones during the
Occupation, censorship of film content strictly forbade
any mention of the war; furthermore, laws were passed in
both regions to prevent the employment of Jews in the

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Frank Capra. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.

industry as well as the screening of pre-war films with
Jewish actors. In both zones the dominant genres were
comedies and melodramas designed to avoid all referen-
ces to contentious political topics. The departure or
imprisonment of French film talent meant that a new
generation of French filmmakers emerged during the
Occupation, including Jacques Becker, who was active
in the resistance movement; Henri-George Clouzot;
Claude Autant-Lara; Jean Delannoy; and others. The
most significant of these new directors was Robert
Bresson, who made his first film, Les Anges du peche
{Angels of the Streets), in 1943.

Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du paradis {Children of
Paradise, 1945) is undoubtedly the most famous film
made during the Occupation. Like the "prestige" films
made during the war, it was a costume drama with extra-
ordinarily detailed settings and a multilayered narrative
that created a densely textured world of nineteenth-century
Parisian theaters and nightclubs. It shared with other
productions of the Occupation, such as Jean Delannoy's
L'Eternal retour {The Eternal Return, 1943), a sense of
fatalism that scholars have read as a veiled response to the
social and cultural changes brought by the Occupation.

After the Liberation ended the Nazi Occupation,
numerous small production companies competed for
France's market. In 1946 the prime minister signed an
agreement with the United States to do away with pre-
war quotas, freeing up the market for competition among
French producers — and from Hollywood. Within the
year it became clear that French cinema needed support
and protection. The government created the Centre
National de la Cinematographie to regulate production,
promote French film internationally, and organize festi-
val entries. France established new quotas for American
films in 1948 and made new development funds for film
available in 1953. Altogether, these responses to
Hollywood's overseas expansion set the stage for a revival
of the French film industry, the economic context in
which the French New Wave emerged.

While the film industries of most combatant nations
made significant aesthetic and industrial changes to meet
the needs of war information and propaganda, Soviet
cinema was already committed to the cause of indoctri-
nation. Governed by the policy of Socialist Realism, its
cinema from 1935 onward was entirely dominated by the
needs and requirements of the Communist Party: formal
experimentation was banned and films were designed
to educate and to provide role models appropriate to
Communist ideology. World War II did nothing to
change this, although historian Peter Kenez has observed
that the opportunities afforded by the war — to depict
some of the real suffering of Soviet peoples as evidence
of Nazi treachery and the need for vengeance — offered a
degree of representational freedom not otherwise associ-
ated with Stalinist film.

Prior to entry into the war, the Soviets made a
number of anti-Nazi films, including Professor Mamlock
(1938), in which the life of a Jewish surgeon is destroyed
by the Nazis. Despite ideological opposition to the Nazis,
Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in
August 1939 in an attempt to avoid invasion. The pact
held Germany at bay until June 1941; by early 1942
areas west of Moscow were under Nazi occupation. The
abuses suffered by those in this area would fuel much of
the war-era film that followed, in which vengeance was a
dominant theme.

The majority of these films were documentary
accounts — or fiction films with strong documentary ten-
dencies. The first newsreel appeared three days after the
war began, and newsreels continued to be released every
three days throughout the war, despite limited resources.
The first documentary made from this newsreel material
was Nasha Moskva {Our Moscow, 1941), which depicted
the home-front preparation for siege undertaken by sol-
diers and civilians. Perhaps the most important docu-
mentary of the war was the one that followed, Razgrom

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World War II

nemetskikh voysk pod Moskvoy (1942), which focused on
German losses — its prisoners of war, its weaponry
destroyed and discarded in the snow. Released in the
United Kingdom and the United States under the title
Moscow Fights Back, it won a New York Film Critics'
award. In the documentaries that followed, Soviet film-
makers demonstrated a willingness to depict the pain and
injuries of war unusual in World War II cinemas: its
purpose was to stoke up Russian hatred of its enemy.
For instance, in Alexander Dovzhenko's Bitva za nashu
Sovetskuyu Ukrainu {Ukraine in Flames, 1943), he height-
ened the effect by intercutting captured Nazi footage — of
smiling Germans — with images of suffering in the
Ukraine.

Shortages plagued Soviet film production during the
war and major studios were lost early on; when films
could no longer be produced in Moscow and Leningrad,
Mosfilm and Lenfilm moved to cities in Central Asia. In
order to keep village Soviets supplied with film during a
time of limited resources, production shifted from full
length to short films from 1941 to 1942; these were
released in groups called the Fighting Film Collections.
The shorts varied from documentaries to short dramas;
the best known is called Pir v Girmunka {Feast in
Zhirmunka 1941), directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, in
which a Soviet woman feeds a poisoned meal to the
occupying army. In order to assure the Germans that
the food is wholesome, she eats with them and dies; her
body is discovered along with the enemy corpses.

From 1942 onward, feature-length production was
again possible; the majority of these were war films,
including a number that dealt with partisan warfare.
The key themes in these films were the happiness of
Soviet life before invasion, the brutality of the Nazis,
and the consequent necessity for courage and vengeance
on the part of both men and women. A number of films
showed graphic violence against women and children,
including Raduga {The Rainbow, 1944), in which a newly
delivered mother is tortured, a newborn baby is killed,
and a young boy who tries to bring food to a prisoner is
executed. Home-front films, like partisan war films, often
featured female heroes, but instead of directly fighting
the evil Nazis, they struggled as civilians to support the
war effort.

After the war's end, Soviet film production dropped
precipitously; by the 1950s, only four or five feature films
were released each year. The reason for this appears to be
that under Stalin the political demands upon scripts were
so strict that few could be completed.

HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR

Following World War I, Americans entered into a period
of profound isolationism. The US government, despite

the escalation of what Americans called the European
War, would remain neutral until 1941. But with the
founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936,
the Hollywood community politicized itself in advance
of the government, a stance strengthened by the nearly
complete elimination of the German market for its films.
Without the worry of losing overseas profits, Hollywood
from 1939 to 1941 released a number of anti-Nazi films,
such as Warner Bros.' Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939)
and MGM's The Mortal Storm (1940). As a result,
Hollywood drew fire from isolationist groups in the
United States. This culminated in a congressional
investigation led by an anti-Semitic Republican, senator
from North Dakota, Gerald Nye; his accusation of "fifth
column" or Communist sympathies in Hollywood
would be resurrected after the war, during the House
Un-American Activities Committee investigations
between 1947 and 1954.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended US
neutrality — and the Nye investigation. The alliance
forged between Washington and Hollywood as a result
of World War II was unprecedented, as Hollywood had
functioned from the 1930s onward as a voluntarily self-
regulated industry under the aegis of the Production
Code Administration (PCA), whose standards for mor-
ality were designed to allow the Hollywood film industry
to avoid costly interventions by state censors.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt
made film into a war industry with the creation of the
Office of the Coordinator of Government Films; addi-
tionally, in 1942 he formed the Office of War
Information (OWI) to oversee all government press and
information services, including motion pictures. Its
domestic arm, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, was a
liaison between the government and Hollywood.
Through an often complex process of negotiation
between Hollywood and these government bodies, the
ideals meant to be incorporated into the war film —
abstract values such as heroism, selflessness, and the need
for cooperation, as well as the more specific concerns of
the OWI such as the desirability of purchasing war
bonds — were added to the values and beliefs already
promoted by Hollywood. Endeavoring to follow the
guidelines provided in numerous memos and booklets,
Hollywood studios still made comedies, musicals,
dramas, romances, and action-packed adventure films,
but they did so on behalf of the war effort.

Combat films such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Air
Force, (1943) and Objective Burma (1945) were based on
real events insofar as they concerned themselves with
actual places and combat initiatives, but their purpose
was to engage and inspire their audience as much as to
inform. In doing so, they characteristically depicted an
ethnically mixed group of US soldiers, metonymic of

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BETTY GRABLE

b. Ruth Elizabeth Grable, St. Louis, Missouri, 18 December 1916, d. 3 July 1973

Betty Grable sang and danced her way through Hollywood
movies from the age of fourteen. After signing with RKO in
1932, her most memorable roles were as the perky co-ed in
films like Collegiate (1936), Pigskin Parade (1936), Campus
Confessions (1938), and College Swing (1938). Her career
took off in the 1 940s, when she signed with Twentieth
Century Fox and starred in the Technicolor musical Down
Argentine Way (1940). A series of colorful, light-hearted star
vehicles followed, each the definitive escapist entertainment
for American civilian and military audiences during World
War II: Moon Over Miami (1941); Footlight Serenade, Song
of the Islands, and Springtime in the Rockies (all 1942); Sweet
Rosie O'Grady and Coney Island (both 1943); Pin Up Girl
(1944); and The Dolly Sisters and Billy Rose's Diamond
Horseshoe (both 1945).

The US Treasury Department noted that she was the
highest-paid woman in America, having made $300,000
for the year 1946—1947. This was not too surprising, given
that she was the star for whose legs Fox purchased an
insurance policy for a million dollars with Lloyds of
London in 1940. This was most certainly a publicity stunt
to launch its newest star, but it forecast what was to be
Grable's best-known role during World War II — that of a
pin-up girl.

Pinups, which featured idealized photos or
illustrations of beautiful young women, revealingly dressed
or (occasionally) nude, shown in a full-body pose, were
ubiquitous in World War II visual culture. Featured on
playing cards, greeting cards, calendars, matchbooks,
tacked up to the walls of barracks, even hand-painted on
flight jackets and the noses of planes, they formed a

persistent visual presence in the lives of American soldiers.
A number of Hollywood stars — like Gene Tierney, Ava
Gardner, and Veronica Lake — were popular pin-ups, but
the most famous and the most reproduced pin-up image
was undoubtedly Grable's 1943 bathing suit photo,
showing off her legendary legs. Unlike many pinups, such
as the well-known photos of Rita Hayworth in a negligee
kneeling in bed or that of Jane Russell reclining against a
haystack, the Grable pinup did little to signify a narrative
or prompt a particular fantasy. Petite in her high heels,
with an almost too-large cluster of blond curls on top of
her head, Grable appeared inviting and yet wholesome,
sexy but not overly glamorous. With good reason, she
called herself "the enlisted man's girl." Grable's pin-up
image was designed to accommodate the viewer's need to
dream and escape. A pocket Venus and ail-American
everygirl, Grable's pinup was an accessible, and portable,
piece of Hollywood fantasy.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Collegiate (1936), Pigskin Parade (1936), Campus Confessions
(1938), College Swing (1938), Down Argentine Way
(1940), Footlight Serenade (1942), Sweet Rosie O'Grady
(1943), Pin Up Girl (1944), The Dolly Sisters (1945), Billy
Rose's Diamond Horseshoe (1945)

FURTHER READING

Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the
Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.

Martignette, Charles G., and Louis K. Meisel. The Great
American Pin-Up. New York: Taschen, 2002.

Amanda Howell

America's diversity, drawn together despite their differ-
ences by their patriotism — and by their hatred of a
common enemy. In order to properly direct American
hatred of its enemies, US combat films depicted Nazis as
cold and efficient killers but tended to imagine the
Japanese as bestial, subhuman — worthy of annihilation.
Such simple representations of America's role in the war
gave way, by its end, to more complex depictions of
heroism, such as John Ford's They Were Expendable
(1945), which withheld victory and emphasized values

of tenacity and devotion to duty rather than unreflective
assumptions of racial or national superiority.

Tenacity and devotion to duty were likewise central
to homefront dramas. Generally speaking, these films
constructed their representations of a cohesive nation — a
homeland — around images of family and tended to iden-
tify the home front with the "good mother" who loves
and protects. Since You Went Away (1944), an award-
winning home-front drama, explored the life of a family
that experiences the full range of privations and losses

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393

World War II

Betty Grable in the 1940s. EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

associated with the war; at the hub of the household, the
wife and mother dispensed good sense and affection to
both her children and others. The film was an epic-
length, studio-era film at three hours, and the extended
family and its friends, like the combat group, appeared as
a microcosm of America, bound by a common cause —
and by maternal affection.

Whereas combat films and home-front dramas leav-
ened propaganda with entertainment, other features
retooled the pleasures of musical and comic entertain-
ment for the purposes of patriotism. Important to World
War II musicals was the way that popular songs linked
musical fantasy worlds to everyday life during wartime —
an effect heightened in films about "putting on a show,"
such as This Is the Army (1943). This film is structured
around Irving Berlin's compositions, including "God
Bless America" — a patriotic song so popular that it
became the alternative US national anthem.

Comedies allowed both military and civilian audien-
ces to laugh at the strictures of wartime. When popular
entertainers donned uniforms, the resultant fish-out-of-
water comedies like Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates
(1941) and Bob Hope's Caught in the Draft (1941)
poked fun at military discipline — and those incapable

of embracing it. Home-front comedies offered the oppor-
tunity to make jokes about shared experiences — such as
housing shortages, the comic premise for The More the
Merrier (1943).

In addition to the role played by studios, some of
Hollywood's best directors took their talents to the mili-
tary, including John Ford, who was the chief of the Field
Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS); John Huston, who was in the US Army Signal
Corps; and William Wyler, who served as an Air Force
officer. In their productions, they brought Hollywood
storytelling techniques to bear on representations of key
battles. One of the most effective was Ford's documen-
tary, The Battle of Midway (1942), which offered an
elegiac vision of America designed, like the combat film,
to inspire as well as inform. Ford's remarkable techni-
color combat footage, including the dramatic image of
the US flag being raised in the midst of aerial bombard-
ment, is accompanied by snippets of traditional folk
music, intercut with narration meant to reflect the views
of ordinary Americans.

Wartime cinema was not only accountable to the
OWI's requirement to educate, inform, and inspire; it
was also subject to the oversight of the Office of
Censorship, whose responsibility was to clear foreign
films for import and US films for export. While the
OWI concerned itself with whether or not Hollywood's
productions would help to win the war, the Office of
Censorship was concerned with whether or not a film
might benefit the enemy, either through breaches of
national security or through impolitic representations
of the US or Allied nations. Alert to any curtailment of
already reduced overseas markets, Hollywood soon
learned to avoid its once-commonplace comic ethnic
types — at least of Allied nationals — and likewise to tread
a fine line in representations of the US military in its
service comedies, lest its films be blocked from foreign
distribution for offering representations thought to
endanger — or belittle — the war effort.

The work of the Production Code Administration
was entirely separate from that of the OWI and Office of
Censorship. However, when there was a clash between
the goal of the OWI to inform the public regarding the
purpose and progress of the war and that of the PCA to
protect American audiences from representations it
deemed immoral, the PCA moderated its stance, partic-
ularly in regard to screen depictions of violence. Prior to
the war, the Production Code had required that combat
be bloodless; but as other media such as photojournalism
and radio delivered more graphic information to
Americans than the Code allowed on screen, motion
pictures came under pressure from their audiences and
from the government to likewise provide more explicit

394

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World War II

representations. In 1943 Roosevelt, in response to advice
from the OWI, urged the military to cease its policy of
withholding the most brutal images of war from newsreel
coverage, including images of both enemy and American
dead. John Huston tested the limits of documentary
reportage in his film The Battle of San Pietro (1945)
and made what is perhaps the most moving of the US
war-era documentaries, a graphic representation of the
battle for a small Italian village in which over one thou-
sand US soldiers were killed. After the war, explicit news-
reel footage of Germany's concentration camps was
shown nationwide at the request of President Dwight
Eisenhower, despite the fact that its horrific images of
the Holocaust violated the Code.

In qualifying the moral authority exerted by the PCA,
the government tacidy acknowledged the existence of an
audience rather different from the one specified by the
Code, an audience to be brought into full partnership with

the war effort — and the war's losses — rather than one to be
protected from images that might inflame or disturb. In the
late 1940s and through the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood's
relationship with its audience — newly prosperous and
becoming rapidly more educated and suburbanized —
would continue to change, one of many challenges the
industry encountered in the postwar period.

SEE ALSO Censorship; Documentary; France; Great

Britain; Holocaust; Italy; Japan; Propaganda; Russia
and the Soviet Union; Ufa (Universum Film
Aktiengesellschafi); Violence; War Films

FURTHER READING

Aldgate, Anthony, and Jeffrey Richards. Britain Can Take It: The
British Cinema in the Second World War. Oxford and New
York: Blackwell, 1986.

Avisar, Ilan. Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the

Unimaginable. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

395

World War II

Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman 's View: How Hollywood Spoke to
Women, 1930-1960. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Burch, Noel. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the
Japanese Cinema. London: Scolar Press, 1979.

Chambers, John Whiteclay II, and David Culbert, eds. World
War II: Film and History. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996.

Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American

Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993.

Ehrlich, Evelyn. Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the
German Occupation. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.

Hirano, Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under
the American Occupation, 1945—1952. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Hull, David Stewart. Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the
German Cinema, 1933-1945. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969.

Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953. Cambridge,
UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological
History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1947.

Mancini, Elaine. Struggles of the Italian Film Industry under Fascism,
1930-1935. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Sato, Tadao. Currents in Japanese Cinema. Tokyo and New York:
Kodansha International, 1982.

Welch, David. Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933—1945.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Amanda Howell

396

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YIDDISH CINEMA

Yiddish cinema must be unique in the annals of world
film history as the only manifestation of a major film-
making enterprise not primarily associated with a
"national" entity. We might say, at the very least, that
Yiddish cinema was the first truly transnational cinema,
but one which ironically and perhaps ultimately tragically
lacked a foundation in a national setting, that is, in a
nation or a unique, sovereign state. A transnational cin-
ema without the national, Yiddish cinema represents the
cinematic flowering of a people living in far-flung places
on the globe, but who shared a culture that crossed
boundaries of space and, as the years have gone by, of
time. A true Yiddish cinema awaited the coming of
sound, for its distinctive and defining characteristic seems
intuitively to be the use of the Yiddish language.
Nevertheless, as an expression of Yiddish culture
(Yiddishkeit), one sees a burgeoning Yiddish cinema in
the silent era, although it was indeed the sound cinema
that created the masterpieces of this unique cultural and
cinematic form.

THE ROOTS OF YIDDISH CINEMA

Yiddish was the primary language of the Jews living in
the Pale of Settlement in the contested territory on the
border between Poland and Russia before World War II.
While Jews all over eastern Europe typically spoke the
language of the "host" country in which they lived,
Yiddish was the connecting current of Jewish secular life,
the mamaloshen (mother tongue) of the people. But it
was more than a language, it was a thriving culture that
produced a body of literature — novels, short stories,
poetry, plays — and a veritable way of being in the
world — a world marked by anti-Semitism, poverty, and

hardship. As Jews emigrated in unprecedented numbers
from eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s — primarily
to the United States, but also to Canada, the United
Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa — they natu-
rally took with them this culture of Yiddishkeit.

Primarily, the silent Yiddish cinema was concerned
with documenting Jewish life in the shtetlach (small
Jewish towns), and it was largely the product of Soviet
and Polish Jews rather than US producers. The screen-
writer Henryk Bojm created such films as Tkies Kaf (The
Vow or The Handshake, 1924), Der Lamedvovnik (One of
the Thirty-Six Just Men, 1925), and In Poylishe Velder [In
Polish Woods, 1928) that were set almost wholly in the
Jewish villages in the Pale of Settlement and dealt vari-
ously with aspects of anti-Semitism, Jewish mysticism,
and fading tradition. In the new Soviet Union after the
Russian Civil War, things seemed very promising for
Jews, and in this atmosphere the works of the gentle
ironist Sholem Aleichem proved particularly popular for
Yiddishkeit cinema in films like Der Mabul ( The Deluge,
1925) and the masterpiece of Soviet Yiddish cinema,
Yidishe Glikn [Jewish Luck, 1925), which brought to
life the author's beloved Everyman, Menachem Mendl.
"Jewish Luck" is an ironic title, for everything this
hapless but good-hearted man tries ends in failure.
J. Hoberman compares the character, as embodied by
star Solomon Mikhoels (c. 1890-1948), to Charlie
Chaplin's lovable Tramp figure — an interesting compar-
ison considering how often through the years Chaplin
himself was claimed as Jewish. Many more films would
be made in the Soviet Union throughout the silent era
and into the sound era before the iron curtain of
Stalinism fell on the region.

397

Yiddish Cinema

MAURICE SCHWARTZ
b. Sedikov, Russia (later Ukraine), 18 June 1890, d. 10 May 1960

If Edgar G. Ulmer is today the best-known of the Yiddish
filmmakers, he notoriously did not speak Yiddish and his
approach to the Yiddish cinema, polished and insightful
though it is, lacks the raw power that one sees in the true
masterpieces of Yiddish cinema, including Maurice
Schwartz's Tevye der Milkhiker (Tevye the Milkman, 1939).
One of many adaptations of Sholem Aleichem's beloved
novel of the bedraggled dairyman and his attempts to
marry off his numerous daughters, Schwartz's version is
regarded by many as superior even to the blockbuster
Broadway musical adaptation and subsequent film version,
Fiddler on the Roof (1971).

Schwartz was a major star of the Yiddish theater long
before the Yiddish sound film appeared. A founder of New
York City's Yiddish Art Theatre in 1918, he always
managed to combine commercial appeal with artistic
pretensions. Schwartz brought major works of theatrical art
to the Yiddish stage, from The Dybhuk to an adaptation of
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. While on tour in Austria, Schwartz
appeared in the film Yisker (Remembrance, 1925), which
was a flop. Despite his inexperience as a film actor, he took
to both starring in and directing Tsekbrokhene Hertser
(Broken Hearts, 1926). An adaptation of a play already over
twenty years old, Broken Hearts attempted to be both
melodrama and social criticism. Perhaps it was too old-
fashioned, despite its melting-pot ideology. When it was re-
released with a dubbed Yiddish soundtrack some years later,
the ending was changed to reflect a more downbeat and
old-fashioned value system.

With Uncle Moses (1932), a film version of a novel by
Sholem Asch, Schwartz helped usher in the prestigious

Yiddish talkie. Updated from Asch's immigrant tale to a
contemporary Depression-era setting, the film found
Schwartz concentrating solely on his acting, bringing to
life an anti-hero who is redeemed by love. If not a
triumph, the film accomplished what its directors (Sidney
Goldin and Aubrey Scotto) and star had intended. With
his directing and starring role in Tevye, Schwartz found his
greatest triumph, one for the ages. With a liberal use of
location shooting on Long Island and a minimalist mise-
en-scine for the interiors, Schwartz accomplished
something akin to the finest films of Oscar Micheaux — a
film style that pays little heed to Hollywood norms,
instead creating an approach that serves the material well
on its own terms. A more downbeat (and scaled-back)
version than the better-known Fiddler on the Roof the film
holds on to its Yiddish roots with a passion that seems to
foretell the events of the Holocaust.

In only its third year of existence, the National Film
Registry in 1991 inducted Schwartz's Tevye. It was one of
the very few non-English language films to be recognized
by this Library of Congress board, which was established
to preserve films deemed "culturally, historically, or
aesthetically important."

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Tsekbrokhene Hertser (Broken Hearts, 1926), Uncle Moses
(1932), Tevye der Milkhiker (Tevye the Milkman, 1939)

FURTHER READING

Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish
Theater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

David Desser

THE GOLDEN AGE OF YIDDISH CINEMA
IN THE UNITED STATES

The rich Yiddish cinematic culture of the United States
owes part of its success to the work of Edgar G. Ulmer
(1904-1972), whose four Yiddish films — Grine Felder
(Green Fields, 1937); Yankl der Shmid (The Singing
Blacksmith, 1938); Di Klyatshe, also called Fishke der
Krumer (The Light Ahead, 1939); and Amerikaner
Shadkhn (American Matchmaker, 1940) — are reckoned

among the classics in the canon. Ulmer's status is partly
owed to the fact that he also worked in Hollywood and
that his Yiddish films betray, despite their low budgets,
the Hollywood style and technical stamp of approval.
With their shtetl settings, the films had an ambivalent
relationship to their New World origins. Considering the
overwhelmingly urban nature of immigrant American
Jewry, Green Fields^ pastoral setting and homage to a
life on the land speaks to just one of the ambivalences

398

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Yiddish Cinema

Maurice Schwartz as Ezra, Herod's advisor, in Salome
(William Dieterle, 1953). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

that American Jewry was experiencing. Alternately,
Ulmer's The Light Ahead critiques, through its expres-
sionist settings and the prejudice meted out to its handi-
capped protagonists, some of the stifling attitude and
backwardness of the shtetls that so many American Jews
had happily abandoned. Ulmer's final Yiddish picture,
American Matchmaker, may also show some ambivalence
about being in America, but its humorous confrontation
with many issues facing ever- assimilating American Jewry
reveals a now-happy accommodation with life in the
New World.

The bias in favor of auteur directors should not
repress the importance of stars to the transnational
Yiddish cinema. The superstar of the Yiddish stage,
Maurice Schwartz (1890-1960), made his Yiddish film
directing debut with Tsekbrokhene Hertser {Broken Hearts,
1926), but it was his importance as an actor that carried
this film as well as Uncle Moses (1932), important films
about ghetto life. Another superstar was Moishe Oysher
(1907-1958), whose own life as a cantor and singing star
was a rags-to-riches, Old World-New World drama in
itself, cinematically retold in Dem Khazns Zundl {The
Cantor's Son, 1927). The famous sound smash The Jazz

Singer of 1927 might also have been called "The Cantor's
Son," and it, too, wrapped itself around the Old World-
New World dichotomy. But the very differences between
these two films might be said to encapsulate the distinc-
tions between mainstream cinema about Jews and the
Yiddish cinema addressed solely to Jews. For in the Al
Jolson film, the battle between Old World and New,
between liturgical music and jazz (popular music), firmly
comes down on the side of the New World jazz-singing
career. Jakie Rabinowitz may sing the "Kol Nidre" on
Yom Kippur, but he then leaves behind this heartfelt
tribute to the old ways for the resolutely New World
rendition of "My Mammy," trading his Jewish costume
for blackface. Not so in the Yiddish film. Not only does
the cantor's son cling to the religious music of his train-
ing, but by film's end he not only rejects jazz singing, but
the New World as well, returning to live in the Old
Country. Since the vast majority of immigrant Jews
remained in America, this film, one of the most expen-
sive Yiddish productions to date, clearly spoke to a rising
dissatisfaction with America, but one which played out
only on screen.

Clearly, as American Jewry became ever more suc-
cessful, and the most cinematically minded turned not to
the Yiddish cinema, but to Hollywood, the lure of the
shtetl proved irresistible to an ever-decreasing Yiddish-
speaking American Jewish audience, leading to Maurice
Schwartz's bittersweet masterpiece, Tevye (1939). Driven
out of his home in the Pale of Settlement and rejecting
his daughter who has married a Russian, Tevye leaves,
not for the United States, as in Fiddler on the Roof
(1971), but for Palestine.

Less star-driven, though often featuring well-known
players of the Yiddish stage, were those examples of
popular theatrical melodramas transferred, usually with
little money and less artistry, to the screen, but the kind
of films the film industry needs to keep cash flowing into
production and out of exhibitors' turnstiles. Generational
potboilers like Der Yidisher Kenig Lir { The Yiddish King
Lear, 1936), Vu Lz Mayn Kind {Where is My Child?,
1937), and Mod der Operator {Motl the Operator,
1939), although they may be read as fears of economic
uncertainty in the New World or the shame of one's Old
World roots, have more in common with the overheated
Hollywood maternal and family melodramas of the same
period. And although there are a number of films set
squarely in the tenements of the immigrant generation,
such a film was already old-fashioned by the 1930s. And
so, unlike the powerful American Jewish literature and
Yiddish theater of the turn of the century and into the
1920s, the Yiddish cinema in America tended more to
the nostalgic, the melodramatic, or the sometimes sur-
prisingly bitter.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

399

Yiddish Cinema

THE GOLDEN AGE OF YIDDISH CINEMA
IN POLAND

The ever-precarious situation of the Jews in Poland per-
haps unsurprisingly led to the production of what is
unquestionably the most artistically important of all
Yiddish films: The Dybbuk (1937). The number of Jews
in Poland was approximately equal to the number in the
United States, and although less prosperous, they
remained closer to their Yiddish roots. Thus, the number
of Yiddish films produced in Poland almost equaled
those produced in the United States, and it might be
argued that artistically, films like Yidl mitn Fidl (Yiddle
with a Fiddle, 1936), A Brivele der Mamen {A Letter to
Mother, 1938), and Mamele {Little Mother, 1938), cer-
tainly were the equal of anything the better-funded
American Jews could produce. With charming star
Molly Picon appearing in Yidl and Mamele, Poland had
an international Yiddish star to compete with the likes of
Maurice Schwartz and Moishe Oysher. But it was the no-

star Dybbuk that gave Yiddish cinema one of its major
contributions to world film. Based on the best-known of
Yiddish dramas, the film attempts in every way to
become its cinematic equivalent — the most artistic and
prestigious of all Yiddish films. And it largely succeeds.
Its expressionistic sets built in Warsaw combine nicely
with location shooting in Old World Kazimierz (which
had become something of the preferred locale for the
European Yiddish cinema, the archetypal shtetl), and
the acting was appropriately theatrical for this story of
other-worldly possession and Jewish mysticism. A mar-
riage arranged between friends for their children as yet
unborn takes a tragic turn through the intervention of a
cruel fate and the young man's unforgiving nature. When
the girl's father rejects the young man, whom he does not
know is the promised groom, the young man turns to the
mysteries of the Cabala to seek redress. Dying amidst his
attempts to conjure dark forces to come to his aid, instead
his tormented spirit takes over the about-to-be-wed bride.

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Exorcism and death climax this dark, stylish, Yiddish
version of the expressionistic nightmares that haunted
the German cinema a decade earlier.

But it was not all doom-and-gloom in the Polish
Yiddish cinema. Joseph Green's (1900-1996) Yiddle with
a Fiddle was as charming a film as could be with its story
of wandering klezmer musicians. Boyish Molly Picon
(1898-1992) indeed plays a young woman who disguises
herself as a boy as father and daughter become part of a
troupe of entertainers. Acknowledged as a star vehicle for
the thirty-seven-year-old superstar, the film was reckoned
little more than a collection of favorite theatrical pieces
fleshing out its episodic plot. The film's hugely optimis-
tic ending seems to ignore rising anti-Semitic tensions in
Poland, but its commercial success in Poland and across
the globe bespeaks of an audience interested not in con-
templating an ambiguous future, but in reveling in a
nostalgic past.

Producer-director Green followed this smash success
with Der Purimshpiler {The Purim Player, 1937), another
story of wandering Jews, this time circus entertainers and
jesters. Obviously little more than a reworking of Yidl,
the film was a commercial disappointment. One theory
brought up by J. Hoberman is that, besides the absence
of Molly Picon, the film attempted to be too much of a
crossover, removing some of the cultural specificity in its
quest for a greater universality. A Yiddish film without
Yiddishkeit seemed hardly the way to continue to pro-
duce a truly Yiddish cinema.

By the time a true Yiddish cinema appeared in the
1930s, many of the Jewish entrepreneurs of the cinema
had already come, seen, and conquered the wider world

of American film. For Hollywood — ruled by the likes of
Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Carl
Laemmle, and Irving Thalberg — was already Jewish, but
with Jews whose interest in Yiddish and a Yiddish cinema
was nil. In this respect the Hollywood moguls are typical
of much of assimilating American Jewry. The sad fact of
the matter is that Yiddish cinema declined due to the
elimination of its primary audience. In the United States,
Yiddish theater and cinema did not extend its audience
beyond the immigrant generation. In eastern Europe the
thriving Jewish communities and the culture of
Yiddishkeit came to a different end in the unprecedented
mass murder of six million Jews, including 90 percent of
Polish Jewry. Though the occasional Yiddish film
appeared after the war, including Israeli productions,
Yiddish cinema disappeared with the destruction of the
audience that gave rise to it.

FURTHER READING

Berkowitz, Joel and Jeremy Dauber, eds. Landmark Yiddish Plays:
A Critical Anthology. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006.

Goldberg, Judith N. Laughter through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema.
London: Associated University Presses, 1983.

Goldman, Eric A. Visions, Lmages, and Dreams: Yiddish Tilm Past
and Present. Studies in Cinema, no. 24. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI
Research Press, 1983.

Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Tilm between Two Worlds.
New York: Schocken Books, 1991.

David Desser

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

401

YUGOSLAVIA

A cinematic tradition in the lands inhabited by Southern
Slavs has evolved under various political divisions, of
which Yugoslavia covers the longest time span. The film
legacy of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is
also crucial to the formation of national cinemas of
several states, such as Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Macedonia. The term
"Yugoslavia," which came into use in 1929, designates
here a territorial, linguistic, and cultural entity rather
than a country.

Indigenous filmmaking in Yugoslavia emerged in the
first two decades of the twentieth century, producing
shorts, scenics, and documentaries often ethnographic
in nature. Local pioneers included Karol Grosmann and
Metod Badjura (1896-1971) in Slovenia, the Manaki
brothers (Yanaki and Milton) in Macedonia, and Josip
Karaman, and Josip Halla in Croatia. In Serbia, Svetozar
Botoric (1857—1916), in collaboration with the French
company Pathe, produced the first feature-length film,
Zivot i dela besmrtnog vozda Karadjordja {The Life and
Work of the Immortal Leader Karadjordje, 1911).
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the establishment of
several production companies — specializing mainly in
documentaries and sporadic feature films — was not
enough to create a film industry. Among the notable
films of that period are the Serbian Sa verom u Boga {In
God We Trust, Mihajlo Al. Popovic, 1932), the Slovenian
V kraljestvu zlatoroga {In the Kingdom of the Goldhorn,
Janko Ravnik, 1931), and films by the Croat, Oktavijan
Miletic (1902-1987), and the Macedonian, Blagoja
Drnkov. A film industry in Yugoslavia emerged only after
the World War II.

NATIONALIZATION OF THE FILM INDUSTRY

The formal beginning of state cinema in socialist
Yugoslavia is dated 13 December 1944, when the
Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980), estab-
lished a film section in the state administration. The
cultural significance of film was elevated through the
centralization of the film industry which was governed
by a number of federal committees between 1945 and
1951. Consequently, each republic was granted a film
company (Jadran Film in Zagreb, Aval Film and Zvezda
Film in Belgrade, Triglav Film in Ljubljana), and a film
archive (Kinoteka, established 1949) and film school
(Film Academy, established 1950) were opened in
Belgrade. Films depicting the battles of Tito's partisans
characterized the early films produced by the new regime.
Slavica (Vjekoslav Afric, 1947) is the first Yugoslav fea-
ture film and quite predictably deals with the conquests
of the resistance. The glorification of the partisans gave
way to films portraying the postwar reconstruction and
the building of a new socialist state. Zivjece ovaj narod
{The Unconquered People, Nikola Popovic, 1947) and Na
svoji zemlji {On Our Own Land, France Stiglic, 1948) on
the one hand exemplify this period of state propaganda,
but on the other reflect the innocent postwar enthusiasm
of the nation. The Soviet-style socialist realism of the
1940s gave way, beginning in the 1950s, to more critical
views of the socialist reality that reflected Yugoslavia's
new political position in Eastern Europe.

A subgenre of Yugoslav partisan films emerged in the
1960s and enjoyed its highest popularity during the
1970s. Although films that glorified Tito's partisans,
combining the pathos of the officially sanctioned war
films with emotionally charged stories, had been made

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

403

Yugoslavia

since the end of the war, with time they acquired the
attributes of a commercial genre. They began to emulate
American Westerns in their emphasis on action and
clearly defined forces of good Yugoslav partisans and evil
Nazi soldiers. The portrayal of major battles of
Yugoslavia's World War II served as excuses for making
such films, including Veljko Bulajic's (b. 1928) Kozara
(1962) and Bitka na Neretvi {Battle of the River Neretva,
1969). Predictable endings and stylistic simplicity made
partisan films very popular with audiences, and some of
them, such as Otpisani {Written Off, Aleksandar
Djordjevic, 1974), turned into television series. Tito's
death in 1980 brought an end to this subgenre.

Yugoslav cinema received international recognition
in the late 1950s through the work of a group of anima-
tors collectively known as the Zagreb School of
Animation. They viewed animation as a form of abstract
visual expression. Their experimental films were recog-
nized for their humorous look at the paradoxes of mod-
ern life and parodies of other art forms while providing a
profound look at the dehumanization, alienation, and
other anxieties of contemporary society. The films relied
on formal simplicity to convey intricate ideas. The
school's achievements were crowned by an Oscar®
awarded for Surogat {Ersatz, Dusan Vukotic, 1961).
Writer-director Vatroslav Mimica (b. 1923), who made
both animated and live-action films, received interna-
tional acclaim for Samac {The Loner, 1958), Kod fotografa
{At the Photographer's, 1959), and Jaje {The Egg, 1959).
Other Zagreb animators of note are Nedeljko Dragic,
Vladimir Kristl, Borivoj Dovnikovic, Pavao Stalter,
Zdenko Gasparovic, Josko Marusic, and Aleksandar
Marks. Many films of the Zagreb school became classics
of animated film and a major international festival of
animation, held in the Croatian capital since 1970, estab-
lished the city as a major force in world animation.

NO VI FILM

A tendency — rather than a film movement — called novi
film emerged in the wake of the political and economic
liberalization of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 70s. While
lacking a program or coherent aesthetics, novi film sought
to free Yugoslav cinema from bureaucratic dogmatism
and promote free expression and experimentation.
Inspired by Italian Neorealism and various new waves
in European cinema, the filmmakers rejected the domi-
nant style of socialist realism, with its officially sanc-
tioned optimism and patriotic education of the masses,
opting instead for exposing the darker side of the socialist
state with its corruption and hypocrisy. More radical
filmmakers voiced open criticism of the Communist
regime. They were called "Black Wave" by the censors,
but later the name began to denote nonconformist film

culture. Zivojin Pavlovic's (1933—1998) Budjenje pacova
{The Rats Woke Up, 1967) and Kad budem mrtav i beo
{When I Am Dead and Gone, 1967) exemplify the Black
Wave together with films by Zelimir Zilnik (b. 1942)
and Bata Cengic (b. 1933).

The best internationally known of all Yugoslav direc-
tors is Dusan Makavejev (b. 1932). His early films —
Covek nije tica {Man Is Not a Bird, 1965), Ljubavni slucaj
Hi tragedija sluzbenice PTT {Love Affair; or the Case of the
Missing Switchboard Operator, 1967), and W.R. —
Misterije organizma {W.R. — Mysteries of the Organism,
1971) — reflect both the thematic tendencies of the
Black Wave as well as the modernist styles of the novi
film. Forced to leave Yugoslavia, Makavejev worked
abroad for nearly two decades but returned to Belgrade
to shoot his Gorila se kupa u podne {Gorilla Bathes at
Noon, 1993). Aleksandar Petrovic (1929-1994) is
another Yugoslav director who established an interna-
tional reputation. His intimate Dvoje {And Love Has
Vanished, 1961) and the partisan genre Tri {Three,
1965) established him as a leading voice of the novi film.
Petrovic's ethnographic Skupljaci perja {I Even Met
Happy Gypsies, 1967) was a great international critical
and commercial success, and the politically charged
Majstor i Margarita {The Master and Margaret, 1972)
won top awards at the Venice Film Festival.

A noteworthy mark on Yugoslav cinema was left by a
group of filmmakers who graduated from the Film and
TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU)
in the Czech Republic. They became known as the
Yugoslav Prague Group, with works characterized by
meticulous attention to cinematic style and plots that
combined drama and subtle humor. The most celebrated
works of the group are Samo jednom se ljubi {The Melody
Haunts My Memory, Rajko Grlic, 1981), Okupacija u 26
slika {Occupation in 26 Pictures, Lordan Zafranovic,
1978), Virdzina {Virginia, Srdjan Karanovic, 1991) and
Petrijin Venae {Petria's Wreath, Karanovic, 1980), Tito i
ja {Tito and I, Goran Markovic, 1992), and Cuvar plaze
u zimskom periodu {Beach Guard in Winter, Goran
Paskaljevic, 1976) and Bure baruta {Cabaret Balkan,
Paskaljevic, 1998), along with Otac na sluzbenom putu
{When Father Was Away on Business, Emir Kusturica
[b. 1954], 1985) and Bila jednom jedna zemlja
{Underground, Emir Kusturica, 1995).

The Balkan conflict and breakup of Yugoslavia
became the subject of some 250 documentary and feature
films made by Yugoslav and international directors and
was unprecedented in post-communist Eastern Europe.
Theo Angelopoulos's To vlemma tou Odyssea {Ulysses'
Gaze, 1995), Kusturica's Underground), and Michael
Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) were the
most representative examples. The political changes and

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Yugoslavia

DUSAN MAKAVEJEV
b. Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), 13 October 1932

Dusan Makavejev is one of the most controversial
directors and screenwriters to emerge from the former
Yugoslavia. Trained in both psychology and film,
Makavejev began his career writing film criticism and
directing shorts and documentaries. From the beginning,
his films posed a challenge to the values of the socialist
state. Openly provocative in his approach, Makavejev
established himself as the most original member of the
Yugoslav oppositional "Black Wave."

His first feature, Covek nije tica (Man Is Not a Bird,
1 965) , is set in a small industrial town and depicts the affair
of a visiting industrial specialist and a local hairdresser,
while at the same time targeting the very fabric of socialist
society, namely, its "shock workers," lack of individual
freedom, social control, ritualistic propaganda, and
hypocrisy. Ljubavni slucaj Hi tragedija sluzbenice PTT (Love
Affair; or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator,
1967) has a similar thematic preoccupation but also
foreshadows Makavejev's future films by foregrounding the
sexual side of the affair between a switchboard operator and
a rat exterminator. Stylistically, the film bears Makavejev's
trademarks: nonlinear narrative, collage of associative
images, documentary and pseudo-documentary footage,
and "scientific" lectures by a sexologist and a criminologist.

Makavejev's breakthrough and international
recognition came with W.R — Misterije organizma (W.R —
Mysteries of the Organism, 1971), a film that he described as
"a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human
bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation
of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and
power over others." Shot in the United States and
Yugoslavia, the film juxtaposed a documentary on the life of
Wilhelm Reich, including his theories of sexual repression
and liberation, with a story of a young woman who tries to
introduce "free love" in socialist Yugoslavia. Followed by
controversy, the film was withdrawn from domestic
distribution and shelved for sixteen years; also, Makavejev
was forced to work abroad because of political pressures.

His next film, the international co-production Sweet
Movie (1974), proved even more controversial because of
its biting double critique of Western consumerist values
and of the degeneration of Eastern European communism.
The film's sexually explicit nature offended Western
audiences and was denounced by many critics.
Thematically, Sweet Movie resembles W.R., but stylistically
it explores the possibilities of Eisensteinian montage in
combination with Belgrade surrealism. The film received
almost no distribution and failed to launch the director's
career in the West. Two of his subsequent projects,
Montenegro eller Paerlor och Svin (Montenegro, Sweden,
1981) and The Coca-Cola Kid (Australia, 1985), were
moderate commercial successes but did not match the
critical achievements of his Yugoslav productions.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Covek nije tica (Man Is Not a Bird, 1965), Ljubavni slucaj Hi
tragedija sluzbenice PTT (Love Affair; or the Case of the
Missing Switchboard Operator, 1967), Nevinost bez zastite
(Innocence Unprotected, 1968), W.R. — Misterije organizma
(W.R. — Mysteries of the Organism, 1971), Sweet Movie
(1974), Montenegro eller Paerlor och Svin (Montenegro,
1981), The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), Manifesto (1988),
Gorila se kupa u podne (Gorilla Bathes at Noon, Germany,
1993), Rupa u dusi (A Hole in the Soul, 1994)

FURTHER READING

Durgnat, Raymond. WR, Mysteries of the Organism. London:

British Film Institute, 1999.
Goulding, Daniel J. "Makavejev." In Pive Filmmakers:

Tarkovsky, Forman, Polanski, Szabo, Makavejev, edited by

Daniel J. Goulding, 209-263. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1994.
Muskavejev, Dusan. WR: Mysteries of the Organism. New

York: Avon, 1972.
Vogel, Amos. Film as Subversive Art. New York: Random

House, 1974.

Wood, Robin. "Dusan Makavejev." In Second Wave, edited
by Ian Cameron, 7—33. New York: Praeger; London:
Studio Vista, 1970.

Bohdan Y. Nebesio

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Yugoslavia

Dusan Makavejev during production of Montenegro (1981). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

the emergence of independent countries were followed by
the development of separate film industries, each with its
own systems of film financing and distribution. Each
country also became responsible for its film education
and national film festivals and for the creation of film
culture reflecting its national traditions.

BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

Bosnian feature film production began after World War
II, and Sarajevo became a vital center of its film culture.
Toma Janic (1922-1984) and Hajrudin Krvavac (1926-
1992) were the most prolific directors throughout the
1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s, former documentary
filmmakers took the lead by contributing features in the
novi film vein. Bata Cengic's (b. 1933) highly provoca-
tive, sarcastic look at Yugoslav society brought him to
prominence but also earned official disapproval for his
Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji {The Role of My
Family in the World Revolution, 1971) and Slike iz zivota
udarnika {Scenes from the Life of a Shockworker, 1972).
Boro Draskovic (b. 1935) impressed critics with his
debut, Horoskop {Horoscope, 1969), a small-town drama.

Undoubtedly, the most acclaimed among Bosnian direc-
tors has been Emir Kusturica, who, ironically, distanced
himself from Bosnia by maintaining a Yugoslav identity.
Kusturica emerged during the 1980s in his native
Sarajevo with coming-of-age films Sjecas li se, Dolly
Bell? {Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, 1981) and the
Cannes winner, When Father Was Away on Business
(1985), as well as the critically acclaimed Dom za vesanje
{Time of the Gypsies, 1989). In his early projects
Kusturica collaborated closely with the Sarajevan poet
and screenwriter Abdullah Sidran (b. 1944), who later
wrote Savrseni krug {The Perfect Circle, 1996). Directed
by Ademir Kenovic, it was the first feature film produced
in independent Bosnia. The Sarajevo Group of Authors
(SaGA), formed during the siege of Sarajevo, chronicled
the day-to-day life of the city and became the leading
voice of Bosnian film when the conflict was over.

CROATIA

Although best-known internationally for its animation
and documentaries, Croatia was also an important center
of feature film production. Branko Marijanovic (b. 1923)

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Yugoslavia

and Fedor Hanzekovic (1913-1997) were among the
directors of the first Croatian films after World War II,
most often war films or historical adaptations of literary
classics. Beginning in the 1950s, Croatian film produc-
tion came mostly from Jadran Film Studio in Zagreb.
Branko Bauer (1921-2002), best known for his Ne okreci
se sine (My Son Don't Turn Round, 1956), and Krsto
Papic (b. 1933), the director of Lisice (Handcuffs,
1970), were the most prolific directors at the time. One
of the best-known Croatian animators, Vatroslav Mimica
(b. 1923), also became a successful director of live-action
films. Veljko Bulajic (b. 1928), who was one of the
favorite directors of the Communist regime, directed
many films in Croatia, including the historical epic
Sarajevski Atentat (The Day That Shook the World,
1975). History and ethics were the main preoccupations
of the two Croatian members of the Yugoslav Prague
Group, Rajko Grlic (b. 1947) and Lordan Zafranovic
(b. 1944), who received international recognition for
visually striking dramas. However, after the war they
continued their careers abroad. Branko Schmidt, Davor
Zmegac, and Jakov Sedlar belong to the youngest gen-
eration of Croatian filmmakers, as does Vinko Bresan
(b. 1964), whose satirical look at the ethnic conflict in
Kakoje poceo rat na mom otoku (How the War Started on
My Island, 1996) and Marsal (Marshal Tito's Spirit,
1999) brought him immediate domestic and inter-
national recognition.

MACEDONIA

Macedonian film production since World War II has
been centered around Vardar Films in Skopje. Although
most of its output has consisted of documentaries and
shorts, the studio has managed to release some forty
feature films since 1947. Frosina (Vojislav Nanovic,
1952) is considered to be the first Macedonian postwar
feature. Many Macedonian films dealt with the nation's
complex history. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Zika
Mitrovic (1921-2005) and Trajce Popov (b. 1923) made
a number of films based on historical events. Local
legends and rich folk traditions were also often used as
sources of original stories. Ljubisa Georgijevski's
(b. 1937) Cenata na gradot (Price of the Town, 1970)
and Planinata na gnevot (The Mountain of Wrath, 1968)
are good examples of this tendency. Other Macedonian
directors of note prior to independence were Dimitrije
Osmanli (1927-2006) and Kiril Cenevski (b. 1943). The
most active during the 1980s and 1990s was Stole Popov
(b. 1950), who came to prominence with documentaries
about the Roma and several critically acclaimed features
such as Srecna nova, '49 (Happy New Year, 1949, 1986)
and, more recently, Gypsy Magic (1997). Antonio
Mitrikeski's debut, Preku ezeroto (Across the Lake,
1997), an interethnic love story, deserves a mention

among a handful of films produced in the last decade.
Milcho Manchevski (b. 1960) is the best known
Macedonian director in the West, whose drama on ethnic
rivalries, Pred dozhdot (Before the Rain, 1994), received
worldwide distribution after winning the Venice Film
Festival.

SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO

The largest and most politically influential republic of
the former Yugoslavia, Serbia has had a well-developed
film culture centered in Belgrade, including several pro-
duction companies as well as national educational,
archival, and publishing institutions. While films by
Dusan Makavejev and Aleksandar Petrovic are well-
regarded in the West, Serbia has been home to many
auteurs. Surrealist-inspired Purisa Dorlevic was a very
prolific director, with some fifty features to his credit,
and a major contributor to novi film, a tendency in
filmmaking with its center in Belgrade. The directors
representing the so-called Black Wave, Zivojin Pavlovic
and Zelimir Zilnik, were based there, as well as several
members of the Prague Group who established them-
selves in the 1980s: Goran Markovic, Srdjan Karanovic,
and Goran Paskaljevic. Other directors of this generation
particularly active during the 1980s were Milos
Radivojevic, Jovan Acin (Bal na vodi [Hey, Babu Riba,
1986]), Slobodan Sijan, Branko Baletic and Boro
Draskovic (Vukovar — -jedna prica [Vukovar — poste
restante, 1994]).

Film production as well as film culture in Serbia
begun to flourish in the 1990s despite enduring periods
of war and considerable destruction to its infrastructure.
Many established directors returned to Belgrade to com-
plete their projects, and a new generation of filmmakers
began to emerge. They initially focused on documenting
the interethnic conflict and the war but soon turned to
fictional works concerned with the trauma of the
Yugoslav breakup and the social and economic decline
of Serbia. Srdjan Dragojevic belongs to the youngest
generation of Serbian directors who attracted critical
attention. His Lepa sela lepo gore (Pretty Village, Pretty
Flame, 1996) is a witty antiwar film. Other directors of
note who successfully launched their careers during this
period include Oleg Novkovic, Gorcin Stojanovic, and
Mirjana Vukomanovic with her Tri letnja dana (Three
Summer Days, 1997). In Montenegro, Levcen Film was
responsible for most of the film production. Its first film,
Zle pare (Cursed Money, 1956), was directed by Velimir-
Velja Stojanovic. Zdravko Velimirovic directed Dan cetr-
naesti (The Fourteenth Day, 1960) and Dervis i smrt (The
Dervish and the Death, 1974). Other noted Montenegrin
directors are Bosko Boskovic, Milo Djukanovic, and
Zivko Nikolic.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

407

Yugoslavia

SLOVENIA

Despite its relatively small size, and with a population of
less than two million, Slovenia developed a distinctive film
culture within Yugoslavia and after gaining independence.
Building on its strong cinematic tradition going back to
the turn of the twentieth century, post- World War II
Slovene cinema brought international recognition for
Yugoslavia. In the 1940s and 1950s France Stiglic
(1919-1993) won numerous awards at film festivals and
Joze Gale (1913—2004) was recognized for his feature-
length children's films. The "new wave" tendencies were
best represented by Bostjan Hladnik (b. 1929) and Matjaz
Klopcic (b. 1934), whose films rejuvenated Slovene cin-
ema with new themes and interesting visual styles. Karpo
Acimovic-Godina (b. 1943) is often considered the most
original Slovenian director, with a number of masterpieces
that include the avant-garde Splav meduze {The Medusa
Raft, 1980). Throughout the Yugoslav period, Slovenian
cinema maintained stability, producing from four to five
feature films per year. Since gaining independence,
Slovenian film production has centered around the
Slovenian Film Fund. At least three films made in the
1990s deserve mentioning: Felix (Bozo Sprajc, 1996),
Outsider (Andrej Kosak, 1997), and Ekspres, Ekspres
{Gone with the Train, Igor Sterk, 1996). Nikogarsnja
zemlja {No Man's Land, 2001), a Slovenian co-production
dealing with the Bosnian war and directed by Bosnian
director Danis Tanovic, was awarded the 2002 Academy
Award® for best foreign film.

FURTHER READING

Eagle, Herbert. "Yugoslav Marxist Humanism and the Films of
Dusan Makavejev," in Politics, Art and Commitment in the
East European Cinema, ed. David W. Paul, 131-148. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

Goulding, Daniel J. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience,
1945-2001. Rev. and expanded ed. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002.

. Occupation in 26 Pictures. Wiltshire, UK: Flicks Books,

1998.

, ed. Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and

Eastern Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Horton, Andrew. "The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Partisan
Film: Cinematic Perceptions of a National Identity." Film
Criticism 12, no. 2 (1987): 18-27.

. "Yugoslavia: Multi-Faceted Cinema," in World Cinema

since 1945. ed. William Luhr, New York: Ungar, 1987.

, ed. The Celluloid Tinderbox: Yugoslav Screen Reflections

of a Turbulent Decade. Telford, UK: Central Europe Review,
2000.

Iordanova, Dina. Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the
Media. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

. "Kusturica's Underground: Historical Allegory or

Propaganda?" Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
19, no. 1 (1999): 69-86.

. "Women in New Balkan Cinema: Surviving on the

Margins," Film Criticism 21, no. 2 (1996-97): 24-39.

Bohdan Y. Nebesio

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Glossary

This glossary contains terms that appear in the Schirmer
Encyclopedia of Film but are not necessarily defined on
every occasion, as well as basic terms required for an
informed discussion of cinema.

Above-the-line. Costs involved in the making of a film
during the pre-production stage. These costs include the
purchase of the property (literary source novel or play or
original screenplay) as well as salaries for the director,
producers, actors, and screenwriters, among others. See
also Below-the-line.

Actualite, actuality. Phrase used by the Lumiere Brothers
to describe their first short films in the second half of the
1890s, comprising glimpses of daily life and famous
events that mark the beginning of film history.

Aerial shot. A shot taken from an airplane or helicopter.
Typically such shots function as sweeping establishing
shots or detached perspective.

Anamorphic lens. A lens on a camera that compresses the
width of an image to fit into the film's frame, and a lens on
the projector that restores the image to its original width
and normal appearance when projected onto the screen.
The various widescreen systems such as CinemaScope,
Warnerscope, and Panascope were all attained through the
anamorphic system. See also Aspect ratio, Widescreen.

Anime. Japanese animation. Broad term referring to ani-
mation from Japan. Anime has distinctive graphic fea-
tures that are different from other animation traditions,
and often focus on the heroic, science fiction-tinged
exploits of young people. Anime entered the mainstream
of Japanese popular culture and achieved international
popularity in the 1980s.

Aspect ratio. The ratio of the width to the height of the
image, whether on screen or on the film strip. The
standard aspect ratio is 1.33:1, which is referred to as
the Academy ratio because it was officially adopted by
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
although it has become the global norm. Anamorphic
widescreen systems have used aspects ratios ranging from
2:1 to 2.7:1. 70mm films are projected with an aspect
ratio of 2:2.1. See also Anamorphic lens, Widescreen.

Asynchronous sound. Sound that either anticipates or
follows the action seen on the screen rather than being
synchronous with it, or sound different from the action
seen on the screen but related to it in another way,
possibly thematic or metaphoric.

Available light. Light for a scene that exists without the
addition of any artificially generated light: sunlight in
exterior locations, or normal household or office lighting
for interiors.

Back light. A light placed behind a subject, usually above,
and in line with the camera. Backlighting provides a
dramatic visual effect by giving a sharp outline or aura
around the subject.

Back projection. See Rear projection.

Barney, sound barney. See Blimp.

Below-the-line. The expenses in a film's budget that
accrue after shooting has begun and including post-
production. These expenses include salaries for the
various members of the crew, editing, lab work, and
location costs such as equipment rental and catering.

Big close-up (BCU). See Extreme close-up (ECU).

409

GLOSSARY

Binary opposition. Term initially used in structuralist
criticism to describe two conflicting aspects of a culture
as expressed in cultural myths and texts. The concept is
often used in analyses of genre films, which are frequently
regarded as the contemporary version of cultural myth.

Bird's-eye shot, bird's eye view. See Overhead shot.

Blaxploitation. Term coined by the American trade paper
Variety to refer to a cycle of feature films made from the
late 1960s through the mid-1970s that were targeted spe-
cifically for black audiences. Blaxploitation movies tended
to be action films with stereotyped characters and sensa-
tionalist plots featuring stories of crime and violence in the
inner city. Although some blaxploitation films were made
by black filmmakers, many had white producers and
directors and imposed stereotypes on black representations.

Blimp. A soundproof camera housing or cover that muf-
fles the noise of the camera's motor so it is not picked
up by a microphone on the set. In the early sound
period blimps were used because microphones were
omnidirectional and could pick up the sound of the
camera operating; this resulted in making cameras rela-
tively immobile compared to the later silent period. Also
called barney or sound barney.

Blind bidding. A practice employed by distributors to
force an exhibitor to rent a film without it having been
seen by the exhibitor. See Block booking.

Block booking. Distribution practice that forced exhibi-
tors to rent groups of films, sometimes unseen, in order
to get particularly desirable titles as part of a package.
Block booking was discontinued in the US after the
Supreme Court handed down its anti-trust Paramount
Decision in 1948.

Blockbuster. A term referring to either a film that is
particularly lavish or expensive to produce, or one that
becomes extremely successful at the box office. The
blockbuster as a concept began to emerge in the 1950s
and 60s as a way for the film industry to compete with
the more intimate style of television.

Boom. A lightweight pole for attaching a microphone to
suspend above the scene and out of frame for sound
recording, and which is used to change the micro-
phone's position as the action moves. Also known as
crane. A sturdier camera boom is used for a camera,
mounted to a moving vehicle, that allows the camera
operator to shoot from different heights and angles.

Boom shot. A shot made using a boom or crane. Also
known as crane shot.

Box office. The actual financial returns generated by a
given film, or more generally, the degree of financial
success achieved by a film. Box office refers to money
generated through ticket sales at cinemas as well as other

ancillary markets such as DVD and video sales and
rentals and television rentals.

Canted angle, canting. See Dutch angle.

Cel. A process of animation in which images are painted on
thin sheets of cellulose acetate or other clear plastic. A series
of such eels, each with slight differences in the image, is
superimposed on a painted background and photographed
one at a time to achieve the effect of motion. This technique
is most commonly used in animated cartoons.

Cinema verite. A style of observational documentary that
uses available lighting, fast film stock, and a minimum
of unobtrusive equipment, especially the hand-held
camera and portable sound recording equipment, to
record profilmic events as they unfold. But rather than
the fly-on-the-wall approach of unobtrusive observation,
as in American direct cinema, verite filmmakers both
provoke and participate with the subjects they film.

Cinematic. Term to describe texts that have qualities asso-
ciated with film or are unique to cinema as a medium.
Some films are more cinematic than others because of
their noteworthy use of editing or camera work, and the
term can also apply to works in other media, such as
novels, that have stylistic similarities to film.

Classic cinema, classic narrative cinema. The dominant
style of mainstream feature filmmaking. The classic style
employs continuity editing to advance the story and also
to encourage identification with characters. Because the
style is characteristic of Hollywood movies, and because
Hollywood dominates the world's film markets, it is
sometimes called classic Hollywood cinema.

Click track. A sound track on which a series of clicks have
been recorded, used to get the exact tempo for the post-
recording of music to accompany a film. The click track
is usually listened to with earphones by the musical
conductor.

Close-up (CU). An image in which an object or one part
of the human body, usually the face or hands, fills most
of the frame. Close-ups are often used to isolate details
from the surrounding environment for emphasis and to
direct the viewer's attention to a particular detail or an
actor's expression.

Closure. In the context of a film's narrative, the extent to
which a story's ending reveals the consequences of the
major action and resolves its various dramatic conflicts.
A film with closure leaves viewers with no unanswered
questions about the fate of the major characters or the
consequences of their actions. Closure, usually in the
form of an upbeat or happy ending, is considered a
convention of Hollywood or mainstream cinema.

Continuity, continuity editing. Film editing that main-
tains a sense of uninterrupted and continuous narrative

410

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

GLOSSARY

action within each scene, maintaining the illusion of
reality for the spectator. Because it seeks to be seamless,
continuity editing is often referred to as invisible
editing.

Convention. In any art form, a frequently used technique
or content that audiences accept as standard or typical in
that tradition or genre. Conventions are an essential part
of any genre, from the gunfighter who dresses in black
in the classic western to the femme fatale of film noir,
from the excessive stylistics of melodrama to the dark
shadows and tight framing of the horror film.

Cookie. A sheet of some opaque material that either has
holes or patterns cut out so that light will shine through
forming patterns of shadows when held in front of it.

Counter-cinema. A term that refers to films that somehow
challenge or subvert the codes, conventions and/or
ideology of mainstream cinema. Films considered to be
works of counter-cinema often engage in distanciation
and deconstruction. In the 1970s feminist theory took a
particular interest in the idea of counter-cinema, arguing
that mainstream film is a patriarchally constructed way
of seeing and that a feminist counter-cinema thus has
the potential to dismantle a masculine gaze.

Cover shot. See Establishing shot.

Crab dolly. See Dolly.

Crane. A mechanical arm-like trolley used to move a
camera through space above the ground or to position
it at a place in the air. A shot taken from a crane allows
the camera to vary distance, angle, and height during the
shot. Also known as boom.

Crane shot. A shot made using a crane or boom. Also
known as boom shot.

Crawl, crawling title. A type of film title, credits or written
text, as at the beginning of Star Wars (George Lucas,
1977) that looks as if it were moving slowly across the
screen either vertically or horizontally. Also called creeper
title.

Creeper title. See Crawl, crawling title.

Crosscutting. In editing, the alternation of shots from at
least two different scenes, usually implying that the
multiple events are occurring in different spaces but
transpiring simultaneously. As well as temporal simulta-
neity, crosscutting can also imply thematic comparison
or contrast. Also called intercutting or parallel editing.

Cut. The most common type of film editing, which is a
direct change from one image to another. As a verb, the
word means to eliminate footage or scenes in the process
of editing, or the director's signal for stopping the
camera during a take.

Cutaway. A shot that briefly interrupts the main narrative
or temporal flow of events to show something else. They
are used to reveal what characters are thinking or to
show what they see, as in a reaction shot, to provide a
transition between sequences, to comment on action, or
to avoid showing something that may be considered
objectionable, such as sex or violence. Cutaways are
commonly used in observational documentary to hide
jump cuts that eliminate parts of profilmic events.

Cycle. A brief but relatively intense period of production
within a particular genre in which the individual films
share a particular approach, as in the spectacular disaster
films of the 1970s.

Dailies. See Rushes.

Deep focus. A style of cinematography that has great
depth of field, keeping the foreground, middle ground,
and background planes in focus simultaneously. In
standard motion picture photography, shallow focus
emphasizes one plane of depth in the shot, which is
generally the plane where the action occurs. Deep focus
is often associated with realism as it preserves spatial
relations among actors and objects and requires less
manipulation of time and space through editing.

Depth of field. The area or plane that is in focus in any
given shot. Lenses of different lengths have different
depths of field; greater depth of field is obtainable with
wide-angle lenses.

Detail shot. See Big close-up (BCU), extreme close-up (ECU).

Dialectical montage. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's
term for his approach to thematic montage, which was
based on Karl Marx's theory of history and class strug-
gle. Eisenstein argues that montage arises from the col-
lision of independent shots rather than their continuity,
creating new ideas not contained in any of the individual
shots alone. Dialectical montage tends to interrupt the
seamless flow of narrative continuity. Also called intel-
lectual montage.

Diegesis, diegetic. Term referring to the fictional world
created by a narrative in any text, including film. Useful
for distinguishing between textual elements that belong
to that fictional world, and those non-diegetic elements
that exist outside it, such as a musical score.

Direct cinema. Type of observational documentary prac-
tice developed in the United States during the 1960s in
which events are recorded as they happen, without
rehearsal or reconstruction. Unlike cinema verite, direct
cinema sought to be as unobtrusive as possible, employ-
ing long takes and minimal editing. Direct cinema films
also eschew a Voice-of-God narration, a technique asso-
ciated with the more explicit rhetorical manipulation of
the earlier Griersonian style of documentary.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

411

GLOSSARY

Dissolve. A transitional device in which one shot appears
to fade out as the next shot fades in over the first,
eventually replacing it altogether. Dissolves are com-
monly used to suggest change of setting or a longer lapse
of time than typically implied by a straight cut. For this
reason they are often used to begin and end flashbacks.
Also called lap dissolve.

Dolly. A platform on wheels most often used to move the
camera and camera operator around while filming to
allow for smooth motion of the camera. In a tracking
shot, the dolly is mounted on rails to allow for smooth
changes in the distance of the camera to the subject
within the same shot. As a verb, the word describes the
action of moving the camera on such a platform while
filming. Also called crab dolly. See also Tracking shot.

Dolly shot. A shot made using a dolly. There are both forward
dolly shots and reverse dolly shots. See also Tracking shot.

Dominant cinema. See Mainstream film.

Double bill, double feature. A screening of two feature
films for a single admission price. The double feature
began during the Great Depression to maintain audien-
ces, and by the 1940s had become standard practice.
The rise of the double feature spurred the development
of B movies, which were made quickly and had relatively
short running times, to fill out the bill with more
desirable A features.

Dutch angle. A tilted shot, making the vertical and horizon-
tal lines within the image appear at an angle in relation to
the film frame. Also called canting or canted angle.

Establishing shot. A shot, usually at the beginning of a
scene, that situates where and sometimes when the
action that is to follow takes place before it is broken
up through editing. Establishing shots make clear the
spatial relations among characters and the space they
inhabit. Establishing shots are usually long shots (LS)
or extreme long shots (ELS), although not necessarily so.
Also known as cover shot.

Ethnographic film. Anthropological documentary that
seeks to present and describe other cultures with a
minimum of interpretation. The use of cinema for
purposes of explicit cultural investigation was pioneered
by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
in New Guinea and Jean Rouch in Africa.

Extreme close-up (ECU). More selective framing than a
close-up, showing only part of an object filling the
frame. In terms of the human figure, a big close-up
would isolate part of the face such as an eye, the nose
or the mouth. Also called big close-up (BCU).

Extreme long shot (ELS). A panoramic exterior view from
a distance even greater than that of the long shot or
establishing shot. Unlike these shots, the great distance

of the extreme long shot often dwarfs human figures
rather than situates them for the viewer.

Eye-level shot. A shot in which the camera is positioned
5-6 feet above ground level, representing the point of
view of an observer of average height.

Eyeline match, eyeline cut. A standard technique of con-
tinuity editing in which one shot appears motivated by a
preceding shot of someone looking out of frame, as if to
imply that the second shot is what the character is
looking at. Also known as match cut. See also Point-
of-view shot.

Fade, fade-in, fade-out. The gradual disclosure or obscuring
of an image as the screen becomes progressively illumi-
nated (fade-in) or darkened (fade-out). Fade-ins are usually
preceded by a moment of darkness with no discernible
image, fade-outs followed by darkness. They are most
often used to indicate the passage of time or change of
location within a narrative, as in the transition between
scenes. Fades are also used in relation to sound, as volume
is audibly raised (fade-in) or lowered (fade-out).

Fast film. The faster the film stock, the more sensitive it is
to light. Fast film is thus especially useful for shooting in
conditions of low light or natural light. Faster film tends
to be grainer than slower speed film.

Fast motion. Action filmed at a rate less than normal,
through undercranking of the camera, so that when
projected at normal speed it seems accelerated. Fast
motion is often used for comic effect or to enhance
the kinetics of action sequences.

Feature film. In the silent era a term referring to the
featured attraction in a program of films, usually for its
relative length. It has since come to mean any film gen-
erally longer than half an hour. More commonly today,
any mainstream film an hour or longer that is the main or
the only film on the program at a commercial venue.

Fill light. A soft light, often positioned near the camera on
the side opposite the key light, so named because it fills
in areas left unlit and softens shadows produced by the
key light, reducing contrast and providing more even
lighting. Also known as filler light, fill-in light, filler, fill.
See also Key light.

Film speed. A term for measuring the light sensitivity of
the emulsion of film stock. Faster film is more sensitive
to light and has higher exposure index numbers; slower
film is less sensitive and has lower exposure index rat-
ings. See also Fast film.

Film stock, unexposed film. Film stocks are differentiated
according to film speed, gauge, and black-and-white as
opposed to color. See also Film speed, Gauge.

Filter. Whether attached to the camera lens or placed in
front of it, filters alter the light traveling through the

412

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GLOSSARY

lens and consequently exposed on the film stock. There
are many kinds of filters, including diffusion filters for
soft focus, color filters, and day-for-night filters that
simulate nighttime lighting while shooting in daylight.

Final cut. The final, finished version of a film. Some
directors have the right to approve or oversee the final
cut of a film written into their contract.

First-person camera. See Subjective camera.

Flashback. The representation of some action or scene
transpiring in the plot previous to the "present" time
of a film's narrative or sequence within a film that
frames the flashback. Flashbacks are used to show the
cause of events and to provide necessary exposition. A
flashback can be either an instance of a subjective cam-
era, as when a character remembers something from the
past, or an example of omniscient narration.

Flashforward. The representation of some action or scene
transpiring at some point in the future of the "present"
time of a film's narrative or sequence within that film
which frames the flashforward. Much less common than
the flashback, the flashforward tends to call attention to
the process of narrative construction since it is often not
understandable until the end of the film when narrative
time catches up to it.

Focal length. Lenses are differentiated by their focal
length, which is measured in millimeters. Focal length
is the distance from the optical center of a lens to the
point at which an object comes into focus. Longer focal
lengths produce a narrower angle of view, as with a
telephoto lens, while shorter focal lengths offer a wider
angle of view, as with wide angle lenses.

Focus. The point from the lens to where objects come
clearly into view; the degree of sharpness in an image.

Foley work, Foley art. Term for the production of special
audio effects for a film, named after Jack Foley, a
pioneer in the field. Sound effects include any sounds
other than dialogue, voice-over narration, and music.
Done by Foley artists, such effects are added in post-
production.

Formalism. An expressionist style of filmmaking or any art
form in which aesthetic considerations take precedence
over content. Formalist films are often lyrical, self-
conscious, deliberate calling attention to the images for
their own sake.

Format. Term referring to the size of a film determined in
millimeters (a film's gauge) or its aspect ratio. See
Aspect ratio, Gauge.

Frame. The individual images on motion picture films.
Also, the border of the image in terms of its formal
composition or mise-en-scene, or the entire image or
border of the image projected on the screen. As a verb,

to adjust the position of the camera so as to keep
centered or within the shot moving subjects.

Freeze frame. A frame of film that is repeated numerous
times, making it appear as if the movement in the shot
has stopped although the film is still in the process of
projection. Freeze frames are often used at the end of a
film to suggest a lack of closure or as if to pause for
rhetorical emphasis.

Full shot (FS). See Long shot (LS).

Gauge. The width of a film strip, measured in millimeters.
Popular gauges have included 8mm, super-8mm, and
16mm. Most commercial feature films are screened in
35mm format, although some special productions are
produced in 70mm.

Gaze. In film theory, a term referring to the ideological
perspective informing the act of film viewing. The gaze
of the camera is seen as expressing the literal gaze of a
character or, more abstractly, an ideological perspective
informing a specific film or even cinema as a cultural
institution. In this larger sense, the camera's gaze
embodies values about gender, sexuality, race, class,
and other aspects of ideology.

Hand-held, hand-held camera. The use of the camera by
the camera operator without the support of a tripod,
dolly, or crane for stability during shooting. The hand-
held camera provides greater mobility than the prede-
termined unilateral direction offered by dollying, craning,
or tracking. However, the images produced in this man-
ner, if not stabilized by a steadicam, are inevitably shaky.
Because the hand-held camera is commonly used in
cinema verite and direct cinema filmmaking in order
to follow events as they unfold, the hand-held approach
is generally associated with documentary authenticity,
even when used in fiction films.

High angle shot. A shot taken from above the subject, so
that the camera is tilted down on its horizontal axis.
High angle shots tend to reduce the height and presence
of characters, and for this reason are often used to
suggest vulnerability or powerlessness.

High-key lighting. Style of lighting that provides bright,
even illumination, with few shadows and strong con-
trasts. Key lights near the camera provide the main
source of light, accompanied by fill lights to soften
shadows. See also Key light, Fill light.

Iconography. Familiar symbols in works of art that have
cultural meaning beyond the context of the individual
movie, painting, or performance in which they appear.
The term was adapted to film studies from the work of
art historian Irwin Panofsky to refer to particular objects,
stars, archetypal characters, specific actors, and even the
more general look of a particular genre, involving lighting,

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GLOSSARY

sets, props, and so on. Iconography provides genres with a
visual shorthand for conveying information and meaning
succincdy.

Identification. That aspect of the experience of a narrative
film whereby the spectator becomes involved with a
character or characters. In the medium of film, there
are numerous techniques such as the subjective camera
and voice-over narration for heightening the viewer's
sense of being in the shoes of a character.

Image. The pictorial reproduction of a photographed shot
on the film strip. In an aesthetic sense, an individual
frame from a film, considering all its constituent ele-
ments such as the mise-en-scene, camera angle, and
lighting.

Insert tide. See Intertitle.

Intellectual montage. See Dialectical montage.

Intercut, intercutting. See Crosscutting, Parallel editing.

Intertitle. Printed words inserted somewhere within a film
rather than in the opening or closing credits. Intertitles
were more common in silent film to provide narrative
information about a story or scene, and were largely
replaced in sound film by the ability of dialogue to
convey such information, although on occasion they
are used in contemporary films.

Invisible editing. See Continuity, continuity editing.

Iris, iris-in, iris-out. A shot that shows the gradual appear-
ance of an image through an expanding circular mask
(iris-in) or the gradual disappearance of the image
through a contracting mask (iris-out) either placed in
front of the lens or made with an adjustable diaphragm
in the lens barrel. Irises are usually used as a transitional
device to begin or end a scene, although it also may
focus attention on a particular detail according to its
placement in the frame or through a pause in its con-
tracting or expanding mask. More common in the silent
era, irises tend to be used today to evoke nostalgia for
the period when it was in vogue.

Jump cut. A break or jump in the continuity of a shot or
between two shots caused by removing a section of a
shot and then splicing together what remains of it. The
term also refers to the cutting from one shot to another
in such a way as to abruptly change the spatial length
between shots. Because of their sense of discontinuity,
jump cuts are commonly used to disorient the viewer by
creating a sudden, illogical, or mismatched transition.

Kammerspielfilm. Literally "chamber talk," a type of
German expressionist film influenced by the intimate
theatre style of Max Reinhardt, which concentrated on
psychological drama. Kammerspielefilms sought to
eliminate intertitles as much as possible in an effort to

convey emotion and character through close-ups and an
intimate visual style.

Key light. The main source of illumination in the lighting
of a scene. The key light is usually placed in front of, to
the side, and slightly above the camera.

Lap dissolve. See Dissolve.

Long shot (LS). A shot in which the camera is at a great
distance from the object(s) being photographed, or a
shot in which the subject is seen in its entirety or in
small scale, including some surroundings. The long shot
may also be conceived in terms of a view that would
roughly correspond to an audience's view of the stage
within the proscenium arch in live theatre. In the con-
text of the human figure, a long shot frames a standing
person. Also called full shot (FS).

Long take. A shot of long duration or one that is relatively
so in context. The long take invites a contemplative
view, preserves time and, along with camera movement,
space as well. For this reason long takes are associated
with a realist aesthetic.

Loop, looping. A loop is a strip of film or tape joined at
both ends, enabling it to be repeated continuously. This
repetition allows for dubbing of dialogue and sound
effects in postproduction. Called looping, the process
is also known as postdubbing and postsyncing.

Low angle. A shot in which the camera is positioned below
the object(s) being photographed or below eye level.
Because this angle makes the action seem to come
toward the camera more quickly and actors appear to
loom above the viewers, low angle shots tend to convey
connotations of power, strength, and control.

Low-key lighting. A style of lighting that avoids the even
illumination of the key light, appearing more dimly lit
or even under lit. Low-key lighting is often used in
thrillers and horror films and is especially associated
with film noir.

Mainstream film. A commercially-oriented movie, typi-
cally boasting big stars, high production values, and
other features designed to attract audiences at the box
office including high concept marketing and wide dis-
tribution. Mainstream films are usually constructed
according to the principles of classic narrative film and
are commonly associated with Hollywood.

Mask, masking. An opaque shield placed in front of the
projector lens that blocks out part of the image to
change the aspect ratio of the screen or one placed over
the camera lens to change the shape of the image. In
silent cinema, masks were frequently used to enhance
pictorial composition and focus viewer attention but
now are generally reserved for point of view shots of
characters looking through keyholes or binoculars.

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SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

GLOSSARY

Master shot. A shot, usually a long shot (LS), that covers
all the action taking place in a scene. In continuity
editing, the master shot is edited together with other
shots such as close-ups (CU), medium shots (MS), and
point-of-view shots to create a seamless flow of action.

Match cut. See Eyeline match, eyeline cut.

Matte shot. A particular visual effect achieved by masking
part of the frame when the shot is taken so that some-
thing else can be added later in the unexposed area. The
combination of images into one shot is done through an
optical printer or with a computer by a matte artist.

Medium close-up (MCU). A shot somewhere between a
close-up and a medium shot, usually showing a character
from the chest to the head.

Medium long shot (MLS). A shot somewhere between a
medium shot and a long shot, usually showing one or
more characters from approximately the knees to the
head and including some background space.

Medium shot (MS). Somewhere between a close-up and a
long shot, a shot in which the camera is relatively near to
the subject or the scale of the object shown is of mod-
erate size. In the context of the human figure, the body
is usually shown from the knees or waist up and fills
most of the screen. Sometimes the term is used to refer
to a shot in which subject and surroundings are given
equal importance visually. Also called midshot.

Midshot. See Medium shot (MS).

Mix, mixing. The process of combining the various ele-
ments involved in a film's final soundtrack, including
dialogue, music and foley work. As a noun, the sound-
track that is the end product of the mixing process.

Montage. From the French word monter, meaning "to
assemble," the term is a synonym for editing, particu-
larly European cinema where the emphasis on the
designed building of a film contrasts with the trimming
for narrative efficiency suggested by the American term
"cutting." Secondly, in Hollywood cinema it refers spe-
cifically to a concentrated sequence using short shots or
such techniques as superimpositions, cuts, jump cuts,
wipes, and dissolves in order to create a kaleidoscopic
effect to summarize a particular experience or transition
in time, space, or situation.

Myth. Traditionally the term refers to a society's shared
stories, normally involving Gods and heroes, that
explain the nature of the universe and the relation of
the individual to it, and that account for a society's
rituals, institutions, and values. In ancient civilizations
myths were transmitted orally and later in writing.
However, in the 20th century myths have been increas-
ingly disseminated through the mass media. In the con-
text of film, genres are often referred to as cultural myths

because of their reliance on formulae, conventions, and
stereotypes.

Newsreel. A form of documentary that combines news
footage, interviews, and dramatic reconstructions.
Newsreels typically appeared in regular (weekly or
biweekly) installments of approximately ten minutes in
theaters preceding feature films. Featuring rapid editing,
a Voice-of-God narration, and music, newsreels were
comprised of a string of discrete stories that tended to
focus on the spectacular, often with a blatant editorial
bias.

Observational cinema. Term used to describe kinds of
documentary film making in which the camera follows
profilmic events as they are happening and seeks to
reveal truths about them. Ethnographic film, direct cin-
ema, and cinema verite are all forms of observational
cinema.

One-reeler. A short film — named in reference to the
length of a standard reel of 35mm film — that was
approximately 1,000 ft., or about 15 min. for silent film
and 10 min. for sound film. Before the rise of the
feature film, shorts had grown from one-reelers to two-
reelers (20 min.).

Optical effects, opticals. Created with an optical printer, a
special effect that is produced when images are dupli-
cated and then something new is added. Optical effects
are used for such transitional devices as wipes, dissolves,
and fades, as well as to achieve such effects as combining
live action and animation. Today many of these effects
are done digitally.

Optical printer. A device for reprinting images from film
onto unexposed stock. Essentially a projector and cam-
era facing each other with a light source behind the film
in the projector casting the image onto a lens and in
turn onto the raw stock in the camera. Many effects
achieved with the optical printer are now done digitally.

Other. Any person or group different from the social
norm. The other can be an individual or a group defined
by such factors as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and
is typically depicted as unknowable, strange, and
threatening.

Out-take, outtake. A shot that is deleted from the final cut
of a film during editing.

Overhead shot. A shot taken from directly above the
action. This camera position is often used to imply a
fate or entrapment, although it is also associated with
the spectacular musical sequences choreographed by
Busby Berkeley. Also called bird's-eye shot.

Over-the-shoulder shot (OSS). A shot taken from over the
shoulder of a character, with some part of the back of
the head and shoulder visible at the side of the frame for

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

415

GLOSSARY

orientation. The camera focuses on some point beyond
the character, whether another character or object.
Commonly used in dialogue scenes, switching back and
forth between characters from complementary angles.

Pan. The movement of the camera on its vertical axis or
horizontal plane (from left to right or vice-versa) with
the body turning to the right or left on a stationary
tripod. A swish pan is when the camera pans so rapidly
that the action becomes blurred.

Pan and scan. The process of formatting widescreen
images for television broadcast or video release by crop-
ping or panning across the screen. Panning and scanning
is done because the television screen has a smaller aspect
ratio (1.33:1) than the cinema screen. As a consequence,
some parts of the images are eliminated and cuts and/or
camera movements added — all distortions of the origi-
nal text. For films shot in widescreen, a more acceptable
alternative is letterboxing.

Pan shot. A shot made with a panning movement of the
camera.

Parallel editing. See Crosscutting.

Pastiche. Unlike a parody or satire, a pastiche is a work
that borrows conventions and specific textual references
from other works. Pastiched works are considered rep-
resentative of postmodernism because as texts they are
concerned with surface recombination at the expense of
generating a meaningful theme themselves.

Peplum film. Term to describe epic films set in ancient
Roman or Biblical times produced in Italy. The word
comes from the Greek "peplos," which was a loose-
fitting overskirt or outer tunic, also worn by Romans.

Plan sequence. See Sequence shot.

Poetic realism. A term describing the style of a group of
French films of the 1930s that combined elements of
realism and lyrical expressionism. These films' stories
often focused on common people and everyday life but
were rendered with an atmospheric mise-en-scene.

Point-of-view shot. A subjective shot that shows a scene
from the physical perspective of a character.

Postdubbing, postsyncing. See Loop, looping.

Process shot. General term for any matte shot or shot
employing rear projection.

Profilmic, profilmic event. Theoretical term referring to
the physical reality that is in front of the camera and
which is photographed by it. Direct cinema and Italian
neorealist films seek to preserve the spatial and temporal
integrity of profilmic events as much as possible.

Pull focus. See Rack focus.

Race film. American films from the late silent era through
the 1940s made by African American film makers spe-
cifically for African American audiences. Many of these
films were distributed and exhibited in areas with large
black populations, and they often were imitations of
mainstream genre movies with poor production values
since they were made on low budgets.

Rack focus. A change in the depth of field during a shot
from either foreground to background or vice-versa.
Shallow focus is used to draw attention to one focal
plane, which is then altered. Usually a camera operator
will employ rack focus simply to keep a main character
or the main element of the shot in focus. Also known as
pull focus or shift focus.

Rear projection. A special effects process achieved by
projecting (usually moving) images in a studio on a
screen behind actors seen in the foreground to simulate
location photography. During the studio era, the tech-
nique was often used to create the illusion of characters
engaged in motion, such as skiing, driving, or horseback
riding. Also referred to as back projection.

Reel. The reel on which film of any gauge is wound. Also,
the measurement of the length or approximate running
time of a film, as in one-reeler.

Retake. See Take.

Reverse angle, reverse shot. A shot in which the position
of the camera is the reverse of what it was in the
preceding shot. Such shots are commonly used in dia-
logue scenes. See also Over-the-shoulder shot (OSS).

Road show, roadshow. A form of film exhibition in which
certain major films are released to a few select theaters,
typically in major cities, with separate (rather than con-
tinuous) showtimes, with higher ticket prices, and occa-
sionally reserved seating.

Runaway production. A Hollywood film made outside the
US, usually to take advantage of lower production costs.

Rushes. The unedited shots that have been made for a
film. During production, footage shot during the day is
printed and synchronized for sound, and then projected
for the director, actors, and others to examine later. In
the studio era this practice was done on a daily basis,
hence the rushes were referred to as "dailies." Today the
video assist system allows for instantaneous playback.

Scene. An imprecise term referring to a dramatic unit in a
narrative film that takes place in continuous space and
time. Scenes are typically composed of multiple shots,
except in the case of the sequence shot. See also Sequence.

Screen direction. The direction of movement in the image on
the projected film on the screen. Through a variety of editing
techniques, continuity editing seeks to establish and main-
tain a sense of consistent space and movement within it.

416

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

GLOSSARY

Sequence. A shot or series of shots or scenes in a narrative
film, not necessarily depicting action in one space and
continuous time but constituting a clearly defined seg-
ment of the film's overall structure.

Sequence shot. A long take that contains action and/or
dialogue that normally would be composed of several
shots in a scene or sequence. In film criticism, a
sequence shot is sometimes referred to as plan sequence.

Set. A space constructed for the purpose of shooting a
scene or scenes in a film, as opposed to a location, which
is a pre-existent or "found" space. However, this dis-
tinction is not absolute, as locations more often than not
are manipulated in some way for filming.

Shift focus. See Rack focus.

Short, short subject. A film of relatively short length, often
defined as less than half an hour. Cartoons, newsreels,
and travelogues are examples of short films.

Shot/reverse shot. See Reverse angle, reverse shot.

Slow film. See Fast film.

Slow motion. Action filmed at a rate faster than the
normal 24 frames per section (fps), so that when pro-
jected at normal speed it seems slower. Slow motion is
often used for lyrical effect, to evoke dreams or memory,
or to reveal the details of movement.

Socialist realism. A style of art, including film, that was
officially sanctioned by the Soviet government from the
early 1930s until after Stalin's death in 1953. Avoiding
formal experimentation, Socialist realism sought to
idealize ordinary people as heroic within the context of
Communist ideology.

Soft focus. Either by error or deliberate, the lack of sharp
focus in any plane of depth. Especially in the studio era,
soft focus was used to provide a sense of romance or
dreaminess and for close-ups of female stars.

Sound barney. See Blimp.

Sound effects (SFX). See Foley work, Foley art.

Soundtrack, sound track. The combination of all the
sounds in a film. In a technical sense, the physical optical
track on the strip of celluloid. Also, a commercially-
released recording of the music in a film.

Speed. See Fast film, film speed.

Split screen. Use of the film frame to contain two or more
images at the same time. Filmmakers have used this
device to manipulate the aspect ratio of the cinema
screen, to provide multiple perspectives simultaneously,
and to show temporal simultaneity in a narrative.

Steadicam. A device that keeps the camera steady when
shooting with a hand-held camera. The steadicam is
strapped to the body of the camera operator, with a

spring mechanism that compensates for shaky camera
movement, allowing for smooth shots in spaces where
dollies are impractical.

Stereotype. A characterization that reduces the complexity
of any group or type to a few traits. Stereotypes are not
always deliberate, but because they are reductive, they are
often negative in representations of gender, race, and class.

Stock shot, stock footage. Shots or footage of everyday
activities, natural disasters, exotic scenes, typically filmed
originally for documentaries or newsreels, available for
purchase or rental for insertion into other films.

Stop-motion photography, stop-action. A special effect
achieved by stopping the camera during a shot, adding
or removing something in its view, and continuing
shooting again. When the footage is projected, objects
or actors seem to appear or disappear within the frame.
When a lengthy process is filmed in this manner requir-
ing many such stops at regular intervals, the technique is
called time-lapse photography; when applied to single-
frame photography to create the illusion of animation,
the process is called pixillation.

Structural film. Form of experimental or avant-garde film
that makes the physical nature of the medium of cinema
its primary subject matter.

Studio era. The period of the height of the studio system,
approximately from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Subgenre. A smaller but distinct division within a genre:
for example, the backstage musical or the vampire film.

Subjective camera, subjective shot. The use of the camera
to give the impression that the images represent the field
of vision or imagination of one of the characters, or
possibly of the director providing editorial comment.
In classic narrative cinema the subjective camera is usu-
ally clearly marked as such, either through such editing
constructions as the eyeline match or voice-over narra-
tion, while in art cinema the distinction between sub-
jectivity and the real world is often ambiguous.

Subjective sound. The use of sound to give the impression
of what a character is hearing or imagining hearing. In
classic narrative cinema subjective sound is often marked
by an echo effect.

Superimposition. The simultaneous appearance of two or
more images on the screen. The effect can be achieved
either by reexposing film in the camera or with an
optical printer.

Swish pan. Effect achieved when the camera is pivoted on
its vertical axis on the tripod during filming so quickly
that the image appears blurred. This transitional device
is often used to suggest simultaneity or a rapid passage
of time. Also called zip pan or whip pan.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

417

GLOSSARY

Take. A single run of film through the camera as it records a
shot. Both the process of recording the shot and the result-
ing images are referred to as a take. Shots that are repeated
in production are called retakes. See also Long take.

Telephoto. See Focal length.

Tentpole. Industry term for a film that is such a box-office
success that it sustains a studio or company over a series
of commercial failures, or a film that has such hopes
pinned on it.

Thematic montage. See Dialectical montage.

Tilt, tilt shot. A shot in which the camera moves up or
down along its vertical axis. Also known as a vertical pan.

Tracking shot. Technically, a shot in which the camera
moves while mounted on a dolly running on specially
laid tracks. More generally, any shot in which the
camera moves on wheels, whether on tracks or not.
There are forward and reverse tracking shots, as well as
lateral tracking shots that move parallel to the action.
Shots from an automobile or truck are called trucking
shots.

Traveling shot. See Tracking shot.

Travelogue. A form of documentary, usually a short film,
that shows scenes from unfamiliar, distant or "exotic"
places. Travelogues are usually produced by tourist
boards or governments to promote tourism and often
present a bland, predictably upbeat view of the place in
question. During the studio era travelogues were some-
times shown along with cartoons and newsreels before
the featured double bill.

Tripod. A three-legged supporting stand for a camera. The
tripod's legs are adjustable to allow for a change of
height or to balance the camera, and a mounting plate
permits the camera to pan or tilt. But the tripod also
makes the camera immobile; although it can pivot on its
axes, it must remain in a fixed position. By 1960, a
number of lightweight 16mm cameras were developed
that could be used with portable tape recorders, and
documentaries began to abandon the tripod in order to
follow profilmic events as they occurred.

Trucking shot. See Tracking shot.

Varifocal lens. See Zoom lens.

Vertical integration. Business term describing the organiza-
tion of the US movie industry during the studio era. The
major studios each sought to establish control of the three
different aspects of commercial cinema — production,
distribution, and exhibition. This monopolistic practice
changed with the anti-trust decisions against the major

studios in 1948. By the late 1950s, the major studios had
divested themselves of their exhibition arms, but some
reacquired them in the conglomerate era of the 1980s
and 1990s.

Vertical pan. See Tilt, tiltshot.

Voice-of-God narration. The use of a voice-over in a
documentary film that explains and interprets informa-
tion. The term refers to the typical voice-over used in
Griersonian-style documentary because it is usually
male, disembodied, and omniscient. More recently some
filmmakers have rejected the voice-of-God narrator as
patriarchal, ethnocentric, and manipulative, opting
instead for a personal voice-over.

Voice-over (VO). Non-synchronous commentary from an
off-screen source. The voice may be that of a disem-
bodied narrator, in either a narrative film or documen-
tary, or of a character, either in the form of an interior
monologue or addressing the spectator directly. The
term also refers to a voice on a soundtrack preceding
the appearance on the screen of the scene in which the
character to whom the voice belongs is speaking the
words heard.

Whip pan. See Swish pan.

Wide angle. See Focal length.

Widescreen. An aspect ratio for a projected film that is
wider than the norm, which is the Academy ratio of
1.33:1. Most widescreen formats such as CinemaScope
are based on the anamorphic system, which is simpler
and less expensive to achieve than systems like Cinerama
that require multiple cameras or projectors. See also
Anamorphic lens, Aspect ratio.

Wipe. A transitional device, usually a line — but can be any
geometrical figure — that travels across the screen, seem-
ing to "push off" one image and replace it with another.
Popular during the 1930s and 1940s, it is less common
in films today, in which directors prefer the greater
immediacy implied by the straight cut.

Zip pan. See Swish pan.

Zoom lens. A lens capable of shifting from short (wide-
angle) to long (telephoto) focal lengths. Also known as
varifocal lens.

Zoom, zoom shot, zoom-in, zoom-out. A shot made with
the aid of a zoom lens, giving the effect of camera
movement without the use of a dolly or crane and with
the camera itself remaining stationary. The subject of
the image increases in size (zoom-in) or decreases in size
(zoom-out).

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SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Notes on Advisors and Contributors

Samirah Alkassim is an Assistant Professor of Film at The
American University in Cairo. His writings include
"Cracking the Monolith: Film and Video Art in
Cairo," published in New Cinemas: Journal of
Contemporary Cinemas, vol. 2.2, Intellect Press,
University of Leeds, UK, 2004. Has also made the
experimental films Far From You (1996) and From
Here to There (2003).

Deborah Allison is a London-based writer and cinema
programmer. Her published articles include "Multiplex
Programming in the UK: The Economics of
Homogeneity," Screen (2006); "Magick in Theory and
Practice: Ritual Use of Colour in Kenneth Anger's
Invocation of My Demon Brother" Senses of Cinema
(2005); and "Catch Me If You Can, Auto Focus, Far
From Heaven and the Art of Retro Title Sequences,"
Senses of Cinema (2003).

Christopher Anderson is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Communications and Culture at Indiana
University. He is the author of Hollywood TV; The Studio
System in the Fifties (University of Texas Press, 1994).

Aaron Baker is an Associate Professor in the
Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State
University. He has co-edited (with Todd Boyd) Out of
Bounds: Sports, Media, and The Politics of Identity
(Indiana University Press, 1997) and is the author of
Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film (University
of Illinois Press, 2003).

Tino Balio is Emeritus Professor of Communication Arts
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the
author of United Artists: The Company Built by the

Stars (1975), United Artists: The Company That
Changed the Film Industry (1987), Grand Design:
Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930—1939
(1993), and other publications.

Cynthia Baron is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green
State University. She is the coauthor of Reframing
Screen Performance: Analyzing Acting as a Component of
Film (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming) and
the coeditor of More Than a Method: Trends and
Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (Wayne
State University Press, 2004).

Jeanine Basinger is the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film
Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown,
Connecticut, where she is also the Curator of the
Wesleyan Cinema Archives and Chair of the Film
Studies Department. The author of nine books and many
articles on film, her most recent work, Silent Stars (Alfred
A. Knopf, 1999), won the National Board of Review's
William K. Everson prize for film history.

Bart Beaty is an Associate Professor in the
Communication and Culture Department at the
University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. He is the
author of Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass
Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2005);
Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic
Book in the 1990s (University of Toronto Press, 2006);
and Canadian Television Today (University of Calgary
Press, 2006), co-authored with Rebecca Sullivan.

Mary Beltran is an Assistant Professor in Communication
Arts and Chicana/o and Latino/a Studies at the

419

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications
include: "Dolores Del Rio, the First 'Latino Invasion,'
and Hollywood's Transition to Sound" in Aztlan: The
Journal of Chicano Studies 30:1 (Winter 2005); "The
New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious
(and Multi-Racial) Will Survive" in Cinema Journal
44:2 (Winter 2005); "The Hollywood Latina Body as
Site of Social Struggle: Media Constructions of Stardom
and Jennifer Lopez's 'Cross-over Butt'" in Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 19.1 (January 2002).

Catherine L. Benamou is an Associate Professor of
American Culture-Latina/o Studies and Screen Arts
and Cultures at the University of Michigan-Ann
Arbor. Her writings include the forthcoming It's All
True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey (University
of California Press, 2006); "Circumatlantic Media
Migrations," with Lucia Saks in Movie Mutations: The
Changing Face of World Cinephilia, edited by Jonathan
Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin (British Film Institute,
2003); the "Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of
Gender" chapter in Redirecting The Gaze: Third World
Women Filmmakers, edited by Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe
(SUNY Press, 1999).

Nitzan Ben-Shaul is Senior Lecturer at the Film and
Television Department in Tel Aviv University and for-
mer Acting Chair of the department. He is the author of
Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films (Edwin
Mellen Press, 1997); Introduction to Film Theories (Tel
Aviv University Press, 2000); the forthcoming A Violent
World: Competing Images of Middle East Conflicts
(Rowman & Littlefield); and has published articles on
Television (e.g., Third Text), Film Theory, New Media
(e.g., New Cinemas Journal), and Israeli Cinema (e.g.,
Zmanim).

Harry M. Benshoff is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the
University of North Texas. He is the author of

Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror
Film (Manchester University Press, 1997), co-editor of
Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2004), and
co-author of Queer Images: A History of Gay and lesbian
Film in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

Matthew H. Bernstein teaches Film Studies at Emory
University. He is the author of Walter Wanger,
Hollywood Independent (University of California Press,
1994; University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor of
Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in
the Studio Era (Rutgers University Press, 1999); and
co-editor (with Gaylyn Studlar) of Visions of the East:
Orientalism in Film (Rutgers University Press, 1997)
and John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in
the Sound Era (Indiana University Press, 2000). His
articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Film History,

Film Quarterly, The Journal of Film and Video, The
Velvet Light Trap, and Wide Angle.

Mark Betz is Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College,
University of London. His articles on European cinema
and archival practice have appeared in Camera Obscura
and The Moving Image, and his book Remapping
European Art Cinema is forthcoming from the
University of Minnesota Press. He has recently contrib-
uted book chapters on art/exploitation cinema market-
ing and on the academicization of Film Studies via book
publishing, and he is currently working on a study of
foreign film distribution in America.

Dennis Bingham is an Associate Professor of English and
Film Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis. He is the author of Acting Male:
Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack
Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (Rutgers University
Press, 1994), as well as numerous articles on film acting
and stardom, authorship, and the biopic.

Ivo Blom is formerly archivist and restorer at the
Netherlands Filmmuseum, is currently lecturer in film
studies at the Department of Comparative Arts Studies
of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Since the late
1980s, he has been frequently publishing and lecturing
on early cinema in journals, volumes, and encyclopedias.
In 2003, he published the commercial edition of
his dissertation (University of Amsterdam 2000) as
Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade. Is editor
of the media history journal Tijdschrift voor
Mediageschiedenis and the art history journal Jong
Holland.

Peter Bondanella is Distinguished Professor of
Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana
University and a former President of the American
Association for Italian Studies. He is the author of many
books, editions, and translations on Italian film and
literature, including: The Cinema of Federico Fellini
(Princeton University Press, 1992); The Films of
Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (3rd.
revised edition, Continuum, 2001); and Hollywood
Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and
Sopranos (Continuum, 2004).

Mikita Brottman is a Professor in the Department of
Language, Literature and Culture at the Maryland
Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. She is the author
of Hollywood Hex (Creation Books, 1999) and High
Theory, Low Culture (Palgrave, 2005), and the editor
of Car Crash Culture (Palgrave, 2001).

Stella Bruzzi is Professor of Film Studies at Royal
Holloway, University of London. She is the author of

Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies

420

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

(Routledge, 1997) and New Documentary: A Critical
Introduction (2nd ed., Routledge, 2006); she also co-
edited (with Pamela Church Gibson) Fashion Cultures:
Theories, Explorations and Analysis (Routledge, 2000).
She is completing Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and
Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood.

Robert Burgoyne is Professor of English and Film Studies
at Wayne State University. He is the author of Film
Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (University of
Minnesota Press, 1997); New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics (co-authored with Robert Stam and Sandy
Flitterman-Lewis, Routledge, 1992); and Bertolucci's
1900: A Historical and Narrative Analysis (Wayne State
University Press, 1991).

Alison Butler is a lecturer in Film Studies in the
Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the
University of Reading, UK. She is the author of
Women's Cinema: the Contested Screen (Wallflower,
2002) and has published widely on feminist film and
alternative cinema. She is a member of the Editorial
Advisory Board of the journal Screen.

Diane Carson is Professor of Film Studies at St. Louis
Community College at Meramec. She is co-editor (with
Heidi Kenaga) of Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on
Independent Filmmaker John Sayles (Wayne State
University Press, 2005); co-editor (with Cynthia Baron
and Frank P. Tomasulo) of More Than a Method: Trends
and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance
(Wayne State University Press, 2004); and editor of
John Sayles: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi,
1999).

James Castonguay is an Associate Professor and Chair of
Media Studies and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart
University in Fairfield, Connecticut. He is the former
information technology officer for the Society for
Cinema and Media Studies, and has published on film,
television, and new media in American Quarterly, Bad
Subjects, Cinema Journal, Discourse, the Hitchcock
Annual, and the Velvet Light Trap, as well as several
anthologies.

Cynthia Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Media Culture at the City University of New York's
College of Staten Island. Author of Watching Wildlife
(University of Minnesota Press, 2006), her scholarly
writing on television has also appeared in Television
and New Media, The Communication Review, and
Feminist Media Studies.

Paul Coates is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His
books include The Red and the White: the Cinema of
People's Poland (Wallflower, 2005); Cinema, Religion,
and the Romantic Legacy (Ashgate, 2003); Lucid

Dreams: the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (Flicks
Books, 1999); The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema,
Expressionism, and the Image of Horror (Cambridge
University Press, 1991); and The Story of the Lost
Reflection (Verso, 1985).

Barbara Cohen-Stratyner (Ph.D.) serves as Curator of
Exhibitions for the New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts, for which she has curated over 50
major exhibits and online exhibit sites on the arts and
history. She has taught at Parsons School of Design and
City College of New York. Among her publications are
Touring West: 19th Century Performing Artists on the
Overland Trails (with Alice C. Hudson, New York
Public Library, 2001, also as web site) and, as editor,
Popular Music: 1900-1919 (Gale, 1988).

Corinn Columpar is an Assistant Professor of English at
the University of Toronto. Her articles published on the
topics of colonialism, postcolonialism, and film include:
"The Gaze as Theoretical Touchstone: The Intersection
of Film Studies, Feminist Theory, and Postcolonial
Theory," in Women's Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 & 2
(Spring/Summer 2002) and the forthcoming "Taking
Care of Her Green Stone Wall: The Experience of Space
in Once Were Warriors," in Quarterly Review of Film
and Video 24:5 (2007).

Ian Conrich is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at
Roehampton University. He is an Editor of Journal of
British Cinema and Television, and a Guest Editor of a
special issue of Post Script on Australian and New
Zealand Cinema. He has written for Sight and Sound
and the BBC, and is the author of New Zealand Cinema
(forthcoming). He is also the editor or co-editor of
eleven books, including: The Technique of Terror: The
Cinema of John Carpenter (with David Woods,
Wallflower Press, 2004), Film's Musical Moments
(2006), and the forthcoming Horror Zone: The
Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema.

Corey K. Creekmur is an Associate Professor of English
and Film Studies at the University of Iowa, where he
also directs the Institute for Cinema and Culture. He is
the author of a forthcoming study of gender and sex-
uality in the western genre, and has published numerous
essays on film and popular music, African American
culture, and popular Hindi cinema.

Sean Cubitt is Director of the program in Media and
Communications at the University of Melbourne.
Previously at the University of Waikato, New
Zealand, his most recent publications include The
Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2004) and EcoMedia
(Rodopi, 2005).

Angela Dalle Vacche is an Associate Professor of Film
Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

421

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Atlanta. She is the author of The Body in the Mirror:
Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, 1992);
Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film
(University of Texas Press, 1996); and Diva: Early
Cinema, Stardom, and Italian Women (1900—1922),
forthcoming (University of Texas Press). Dalle Vacche
has also edited two anthologies: The Visual Turn:
Classical Film Theory and Art History (Rutgers, 2002);
and, with Brian Price, Color in Film: A Reader
(Routledge, 2006).

Michael DeAngelis is an Associate Professor at DePaul
University's School for New Learning, where he teaches
in the areas of media and cultural studies. He is the
author of Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James
Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves (Duke University
Press, 2001), along with journal articles and anthology
chapters on film history, stars and fan culture, and
cultural studies.

Ana Del Sarto is an Assistant Professor of Latin American
literature and cultures in the department of Spanish and
Portuguese at Ohio State University. Among her recent
publications are "Los estudios culturales latinoamerica-
nos hacia el siglo XXI," co-edited with Alicia Rios and
Abril Trigo for a special issue of Revista Iberoamericana,
and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, co-
edited also with Alicia Rios and Abril Trigo (Duke
University Press, 2004).

David Desser (Advisor) is Professor of Cinema Studies,
Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and
Cultures, and Jewish Studies at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The
Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa (UMI Research Press,
1983), Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese
New Wave Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1988), the
co-author (with Lester D. Friedman) of American Jewish
Filmmakers (University of Illinois Press, 2004), the edi-
tor of Ozu's "Tokyo Story" (Cambridge University Press,
1997), and the co-editor of a number of other books on
Asian cinema.

Marvin D'Lugo is Professor of Spanish at Clark
University. He is the author of The Films of Carlos
Saura: The Practice of Seeing (Princeton University
Press, 1991); Guide to the Cinema of Spain
(Greenwood Press, 1997); and Pedro Almodovar
(University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Lisa Dombrowski is an Assistant Professor in the Film
Studies Department of Wesleyan University, where she
teaches courses on fdm form and analysis, international
art cinema, and the American fdm industry. She has
published an article on black and white Cinemascope
aesthetics in low budget American fdms, and has com-
pleted a manuscript on the writer/director/producer

Samuel Fuller entitled If You Die I'll Kill You: The
Cinema of Samuel Fuller.

Janina Falkowska is an Associate Professor and Vice-
Chair of the Department of Film Studies of the
University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.
Her publications include; The New Polish Cinema
(ed. and introduction, 2003); National Cinemas in
Postwar East-Central Europe (Special Edition of the
Canadian Slavonic Papers, ed. and introduction,
2000); The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda.
Dialogism in "Man of Marble, " "Man of Iron " and
"Danton" (1996); book chapters and articles on
Western European and East-Central European cine-
mas, European women's cinemas, postmodernism in
cinema, religion and spirituality in cinema and dialo-
gism in cinema in Canadian Journal of Film Studies,
Cinema Journal, Canadian Woman Studies, and books
edited by Paul Coates, Christina Degli Esposti and
Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul.

Peter X Feng is an Associate Professor of English and
Women's Studies at the University of Delaware. He is
the author of Identities in Motion: Asian American Film
& Video (Duke University Press, 2002) and the editor of
Screening Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press,
2002).

Craig Fischer is an Associate Professor in the English
Department of Appalachian State University. He is a
past member of the Executive Committee of the Society
for Cinema and Media Studies, a previous assistant
editor at Cinema Journal, and a current member of the
Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts
Festival at the Library of Congress. His articles have
appeared in the Velvet Light Trap, Spectator, the
National Women's Studies Association Journal, the
Comics Journal, and the International Journal of Comic
Art.

David William Foster (Ph.D.) is former Chair of the
Department of Languages and Literatures and Regents'
Professor of Spanish, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and
Women's Studies at Arizona State University. He has
written extensively on Argentine fdmmaking, narrative
and theater, and has held Fulbright teaching appoint-
ments in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. He is the
author of Queer Issues in Latin American Filmmaking
(University of Texas Press, 2003).

Erin Foster is an Adjunct Professor at Kirkwood
Community College in Iowa City, Iowa. She recieved
her M.A. at the University of Texas at Austin from the
Radio-Television-Film Department (Critical/cultural
studies) in 2000. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D.
in Communication and Media Studies at the European
Graduate School.

422

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Katherine A. Fowkes is an Associate Professor of Media
Studies at High Point University. Her publications in
the area of Fantasy include the book Giving Up the
Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream
Comedy Films (Wayne State University Press, 1998).
She is also a script consultant and screenwriter, special-
izing in Comic Fantasy and Science Fiction thrillers.

Mattias Frey is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University
and writes film reviews for the Boston Phoenix. His
recent and forthcoming publications address new
Austrian cinema, fashion and genre in Performance, the
role of film in W.G. Sebald's writings, the body "in"
and "of" Pasolini's Porcile, and Eyes Wide Shut's love-
adaptation nexus.

Frances K. Gateward is an Assistant Professor in the Unit
for Cinema Studies and the African American Studies
and Research Program at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign. She is the co-editor of the anthol-
ogies Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of
Girlhood (Wayne State University Press, 2002) and
Where the Boys Are: Youth and Masculinity in the
Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2005).

Wes D. Gehring is Professor of Film at Ball State
University and an Associate Media Editor for USA
Today Magazine, for which he also writes the column
"Reel World." He is the award-winning author of twenty
books, including two genre texts on screwball comedy,
as well as biographies of such pivotal screwball players as
director Leo McCarey and actresses Carole Lombard
and Irene Dunne.

Dan Georgakas is a Fellow of the Center of Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies at Queens College (CUNY) and
Adjunct Associate Professor at the Center for Global
Affairs at New York University. He is a long-time editor
of Cineaste film quarterly. He is co-editor of The
Cineaste Interviews (Lake View Press, 1983), The
Cineaste Interviews 2 (Lake View Press, 2002), In
Focus: A Guide To Using Films (NY Zoetrope, 1980),
and Con un altro obiettivo (Maximum-Fax, 2006). He
co-edited a special issue on Greek Cinema for Film
Criticism (v. 27, no. 2, 2002/03) and is a frequent
contributor on Greek film to textbooks and journals.

Christopher E. Gittings is an Associate Professor and
Chair in the Department of Film Studies at the
University of Western Ontario. He is the author of
Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and
Representation (Routledge, 2002) and editor of and con-
tributor to Imperialism and Gender: Constructions of
Masculinity (Kunapipi, 1996) as well as the author of
articles on national formations in film, literature, and
television.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

Ruth Goldberg teaches at SUNY/Empire State College,
New York University School of Continuing and
Professional Studies, and at the Escuela Internacional
de Cine y Lelevision in Cuba. Her work on the horror
film and on Latin American Cinema has appeared in the
journals Miradas and Kinoeye, and the anthologies
Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Fear
Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe,
Japanese Horror Cinema, Monstrous Adaptations, and
others.

Barry Keith Grant (Editor in Chief) is Professor of Film
Studies and Popular Culture at Brock University, St.
Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He is the author, editor or
co-author of more than a dozen books on film, includ-
ing Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of
Documentary Film and Video (Wayne State University
Press, 1998), The Film Studies Dictionary (Arnold,
2001), Film Genre Reader III (University of Texas
Press, 2003), and Film Genre: From Iconography to
Ideology (Wallflower Press, 2006). He also edits the
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television series
for Wayne State University Press and the New
Approaches to Film Genre series for Blackwell
Publishers.

Sean Griffin is an Associate Professor in the Division of
Cinema-Television at Southern Methodist University.
He is the author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The
Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out (New York
University Press, 1999); and is co-author (with Harry
Benshoff) of America on Film: Representing Race, Class,
Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (Blackwell, 2003) and
Queer Images: A History of Gay and lesbian Film in
America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Peter Hames is Honorary Research Associate in Film and
Media Studies at Staffordshire University. His books
include The Czechoslovak New Wave (Wallflower Press,
1985/2005) and, as editor, The Cinema of Central
Europe (Wallflower Press, 2004) and Dark Alchemy:
The Films of fan Svankmajer (Greenwood Press, 1995).

Stephen Handzo has taught film at Columbia University,
contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica ("Motion
Pictures: Technology") and the anthology Film Sound:
Theory and Practice (Columbia University Press, 1985),
and has written articles for Film Comment, Cineaste,
Bright Lights, and others.

Joanna Hearne is an Assistant Professor at the University
of Missouri-Columbia, where she teaches and writes on
topics in film studies, Native American studies, and
folklore. She has published articles in the Journal of
Popular Film and Television and in the collection
Hollywood's Wests: The American Frontier in Film,
Television, and History (University Press of Kentucky,

423

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

2005). She has work forthcoming in the journals Screen
and Western Folklore.

Heather Hendershot teaches at Queens College and at the
City University of New York Graduate Center. She is
the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics,
and Economics of America's Only TV Channel for Kids
(New York University Press, 2004) and the author of
Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before
the V-Chip (Duke University Press, 1998) and Shaking
the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical
Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Scott Henderson is a Lecturer in Film and Popular
Culture at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario,
Canada. He has contributed various articles on youth
culture and national cinemas to a number of books
which include: "Youth Sexuality and the Nation:
Beautiful Thing and Show Me Love" in Youth Culture
and Global Cinema, edited by Timothy Shary and
Alexandra Seibel (University of Texas Press, forthcom-
ing Fall 2006); "Youth Identity and the 'Musical
Moment' in Contemporary Youth Cinema" in Musical
Moments: Film and the Performance of Song and Dance,
edited by Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (Edinburgh
University Press, 2006); as well as three chapters to
Where are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture
and the Legacies of History, edited by Coral Ann Howells
(Rodopi Press, 2004).

Joanne Hershfield is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Communication Studies and
Curriculum in Women's Studies at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The
Invention of Dolores del Rio (University of Minnesota
Press, 2000) and Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman,
1940-50 (University of Arizona Press, 1996).

Jim Hillier (Advisor) worked in the Education
Department of the British Film Institute during the
1970s, then taught Film Studies in the Department of
Film & Drama at Bulmershe College of Higher
Education during the 1980s. Since 1989 he has been
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of
Reading, in what is now the Department of Film,
Theatre & Television. His publications include: as
editor, Cahiers du Cinema Vol. 1: the 1950s and Vol. 2:
the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1985/1986) and
American Independent Cinema (BFI Publishing, 2001);
and as author, The New Hollywood (Cassell Illustrated,
1993).

Matt Hills is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural
Studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of Fan
Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror
(Continuum, 2005), and How to Do Things with
Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005).

Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural
Studies and Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film
and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. She is the author or editor of several books on
broadcasting history, including Radio Voices: American
Broadcasting 1922—1952 (University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), Only Connect: A Cultural History of
Broadcasting in the United States (Wadsworth, 2nd
ed., 2006), and NBC: America's Network (California,
2006).

Jan-Christopher Horak is a professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles in Critical Studies and MIAS.
He is the founding editor of The Moving Image and the
curator of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum.
Previously, he has served as Director, Archives &
Collections, Universal Studios; Director, Munich
Filmmuseum; Senior Curator, George Eastman House.
His publications include: Making Images Move
(Smithsonian Books, 1997), Lovers of Cinema: The
First American Film Avant-Garde (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1995), The Dream Merchants
(International Museum Photography, 1989), and
Helmar Lerski (1982).

Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film
and Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma, an
award-winning screenwriter, and the author of eighteen
books on film, screenwriting, and cultural studies includ-
ing: Screenwriting for a Global Market (University of
California Press, 2004), Henry Bumstead and the World
of Hollywood Art Direction (University of Texas Press,
2003), Writing the Character Centered Screenplay
(University of California Press, 2000), The Films of
Theo Angelopoulos (Princeton University Press, 1999),
and Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy Centered
Screenplay (University of California Press, 1999). His films
include The Dark Side of the Sun and Something in
Between (dir. Srdjan Karanovic, 1983). He has also given
screenwriting workshops around the world.

Amanda Howell is a Senior Lecturer (Film and Screen) in
the Faculty of Arts at Griffith University, Brisbane,
Australia. Her work on screen representations of war
has appeared in Camera Obscura, Genders, Genre, and
other journals.

Stan Jones is Senior Lecturer in Screen and Media at the
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. His
publications include: "Wim Wenders" in Fifty
Contemporary Filmmakers, edited by Yvonne Tasker
(Routledge, 2002); "The Use and Denial of German
History in Josef Vilsmaier's Film Comedian Harmonists"
in Writing Europe's Pasts, edited by Christian Leitz and
Joseph Zizek (Australian Humanities Press, 2003); and
"Turkish-German Cinema Today: A Case Study of
Fatih Akin's kurz und schmerzlos and Lm Juli" in

424

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

European Cinema: Inside Out, edited by Guido Rings
and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (2003).

Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Director of
the Film Studies program at Rhode Island College. She
is the author of numerous articles on film music as well
as the book Settling the Score: Music and the Classical
Hollywood Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)
and the forthcoming How the West Was Sung: Music in
the Westerns of John Ford (University of California Press,
2007).

E. Ann Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony
Brook University, where she also founded and directs
The Humanities Institute. She is currently Past
President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Kaplan has written many books and articles on topics in
cultural studies, media, and women's studies, from
diverse theoretical perspectives including psychoanalysis,
feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. She has
given lectures all over the world and her work has been
translated into six languages. Her many books include:
Women in Film: Both Sides of the Camera (Routledge,
1983/2000); Motherhood and Representation: The Mother
in Popular Culture and Melodrama (Routledge, 1992/
2002); Looking For the Other: Feminism, Film and the
Imperial Gaze (Routledge, 1997); Playing Dolly:
Technocultural Formations, Fantasies and Fictions of
Assisted Reproduction, co-edited with Susan Squier
(Rutgers University Press, 1998); Feminism and Film
(Oxford University Press, 2000); Trauma and Cinema:
Cross-Cultural Explorations, co-edited with Ban Wang
(Hong Kong University Press, 2004); and Trauma
Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature (2005).

Charlie Keil is Director of the Cinema Studies Program and
an Associate Professor in the Department of History at
the University of Toronto. He is the author of Early
American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and
Filmmaking, 1907—1913 (University of Wisconsin Press,
2002); and is co-editor, with Shelley Stamp, of American
Cinema s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices
(University of California Press, 2004).

Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the
Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is the author
of many books on social theory, politics, history, and
culture, including Camera Politica: The Politics and
Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, with Michael
Ryan (Indiana University Press, 1988); Media Culture
(Routledge, 1995); and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of
Democracy (Paradigm Publishers, 2005).

Vance Kepley, Jr. is Professor of Film Studies and Chair of
the Communication Arts Department at the University

of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Service
of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), "The End of St.
Petersburg": The Film Companion (LB. Tauris, 2003),
and numerous essays on Soviet film.

Malek Khouri is an Assistant Professor of film in the Faculty
of Communication and Culture at the University of
Calgary. His recent research concentrates on Arab
Cinema, and he is currently writing a book about
Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine. His earlier work
discusses the representation of class in Canadian cinema.
He co-edited the anthology Working On Screen:
Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema
(University of Toronto Press, 2006). His work on Arab and
Canadian cinema also appears in Arab Studies Quarterly and
the anthology How Canadians Communicate (University of
Calgary Press, 2003), among other places.

Kyung Hyun Kim is an Associate Professor in the
Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures,
and he also serves as Director of the Film and Video
Center at the University of California, Irvine. He is the
author of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema
(Duke University Press, 2006) and, with David E.
James, the co-editor of Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of
Korean National Cinema (Wayne State University Press,
2003). Kim also shares producer's credit on two feature-
length films: Never Forever (dir. Gina Kim, 2007) and
Invisible Light (dir. Gina Kim, 2003).

Geoff King is Reader in Film and TV Studies at Brunei
University, London, UK. He is the author of books
including American Independent Cinema (LB. Tauris/
Indiana University Press, 2005), New Hollywood
Cinema: An Introduction (LB Tauris/Columbia
University Press, 2002), Film Comedy (Wallflower
Press, 2002), and Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in
the Age of the Blockbuster (LB Tauris, 2000). He is also
co-author with Tanya Krzywinska of Tomb Raiders and
Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts (LB
Tauris, 2005) and co-editor of ScreenPlay: cinema/video-
games/interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002).

Adam Knee is an Assistant Professor and MA. Program
Coordinator in the Ohio University School of Film.
Among his publications are essays on Thai cinema in
the journal Asian Cinema and in the anthologies Horror
International (Wayne State University Press, 2005) and
Contemporary Asian Cinema (with co-author Anchalee
Chaiworaporn, Berg, 2006).

Robert Kolker is Emeritus Professor at the University of
Maryland and has served as Chair of the School of
Literature, Communication, and Culture at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of a
number of books, including A Cinema of Loneliness:

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

425

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, andAltman (3rd
edition, Oxford University Press, 2000) and the text-
book Film, Form, and Culture (McGraw Hill, 1998). He
is the editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho: A Casebook
(Oxford University Press, 2004).

Sarah Kozloff is Professor of Film at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, New York. She has published Invisible
Storytellers: Voice-over Narration in American Fiction
Film (University of California Press, 1988) and
Overhearing Film Dialogue (University of California
Press, 2000), as well as "Narrative Theory and
Television" in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed.
Robert C. Allen (University of North Carolina Press,
1992).

Tanya Krzywinska is Professor of Screen Media Studies at
Brunei University, London, and Vice President of the
Digital Games Research Association. She authored A
Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo
in Film (Flicks Books, 2000) and Sex and the Cinema
(Wallflower, 2006). With Geoff King, she co-wrote
Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and
Contexts (LB. Tauris, 2006), and co-edited ScreenPlay:
cinema/videogames/interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002).
She also co-edited Videogame/Player/Text (Manchester
University Press, forthcoming) with Barry Atkins.

Annette Kuhn is Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster
University, UK, and an editor of the journal Screen. Her
books include Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), Family Secrets: Acts of
Memory and Imagination (Verso, 1995), and Dreaming
of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New
York University Press, 2002).

Mita Lad is currently at the University of Nottingham
completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Continuing
Education. Her research interests include world cinema,
literature to film adaptations, and psychoanalysis. She
completed her undergraduate degree at Staffordshire
University in Film, Television and Radio Studies and
then her MA in Film Studies at the Universiteit van
Amsterdam.

David Laderman is Professor of Film at the College of San
Mateo, and the author of Driving Visions: Exploring the
Road Movie (University of Texas Press, 2002). He has
also published in Cinema Journal and Film Quarterly.

Joseph Lampel is Professor of Strategy at Cass Business
School, City University, London. He is the Academic
Director of the Film Business Academy at the Cass
Business School. He is the author of Strategy Safari
(Free Press & Prentice-Hall, 1998), Strategy Bites Back
(Pearson Publishing, 2005) with Henry Mintzberg and
Bruce Ahlstrand, and The Business of Culture: Strategic
Perspectives on Entertainment and Media (Lawrence

Erlbaum, 2005) with Jamal Shamsie and Theresa Lant.
He has also published articles on the fdm industry in
Journal of Management (2000) and Journal of
Management Studies (2003).

Marcia Landy is Distinguished Service Professor of
English and Film Studies with a secondary appointment
in the French and Italian Department at the University
of Pittsburgh. Her publications include: Cinematic Uses
of the Past (University of Minnesota Press, 1996); The
Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality and Spectacle in
Italian Cinema, 1930-1945 (SUNY Press, 1998);
Italian Film (Cambridge University Press, 2000); The
Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (Rutgers
University Press, 2001); Stars: The Reader with Lucy
Fischer (Routledge, 2004); and Monty Python's Flying
Circus (Wayne University Press, 2004).

Jenny Kwok Wah Lau is an Associate Professor in the
Cinema Department of San Francisco State University.
She has previously published articles in Film Quarterly,
Cinema Journal, and Wide Angle. Her book Multiple
Modernities: Cinema and Popular Media in
Transcultural East Asia was published by Temple
University Press in 2003.

Thomas Leitch is Professor of English and Director of
Film Studies at the University of Delaware. His most
recent publications include The Alfred Hitchcock
Encyclopedia (Facts on File, 2002), Crime Films
(Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Perry Mason
(Wayne State University Press, 2005).

John A. Lent is the founder, editor-in-chief, and publisher

of International Journal of Comic Art; editor-in-chief and
publisher of Asian Cinema; and chair of the Asian
Cinema Studies Society. Among his seventy books are
Asian Film Industry (Croom-Helm, 1990) and One
Hundred Years of Chinese Cinema: A Generational
Dialogue with Haili Kong (EastB ridge, 2006). He has
taught in universities in the US, Philippines, Malaysia,
and China since 1960.

Jon Lewis is a professor in the English Department at
Oregon State University, where he has taught film and
cultural studies since 1983. He has published over sixty
essays in anthologies and journals, as well as five books,
including The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films
and Youth Culture (Routledge, 1992), which won a
Choice Magazine Academic Book of the Year Award.
Other books include Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . .
Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood (Duke
University Press, 1995), The New American Cinema
(Duke University Press, 1998), Hollywood v. Hard Core:
How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film
Industry (New York University Press, 2000), and The End
of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

426

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

(New York University Press, 2002). Forthcoming are the
anthology Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in
American Film History and Method and a comprehensive
book on American film history entitled American Film; A
History. In 2002, he was named Editor of Cinema Journal
and presendy sits on the Executive Council of the Society
for Cinema and Media Studies.

Moya Luckett is a visiting Assistant Professor in Media
Studies at Queens College. She has published articles on
television, film history, and femininity in such journals
as Screen and The Velvet Light Trap, and has written
chapters in several anthologies. She is currently complet-
ing a manuscript titled Cinema and Community:
Progressivism, Spectatorship and Identity in Chicago,
1907— 1917 and is working on a book on femininity in
popular film and television. With Hilary Radner, she is
co-editor of Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the
1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

William Luhr is Professor of English and Film at Saint
Peter's College in New Jersey. He also serves as co-chair
of the prestigious Columbia University seminar on
Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation. His pre-
vious books include: Thinking About Movies: Watching,
Questioning, Enjoying, with Peter Lehman (Blackwell
Publishing, 2nd edition, 2003); Raymond Chandler and
Film (Florida State University Press, 2nd edition, 1991);
and The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, Director (Rutgers
University Press, 1995).

Charles J. Maland teaches cinema studies and American
studies in the English Department at the University of
Tennessee. He is author, among others, of Chaplin and
American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image
(Princeton University Press, 1989), which won the
Theater Library Association Award for best book in
the area of recorded performance (film, television, or
radio) in its year of release.

Andreea Marinescu is a doctoral candidate in the
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at
the University of Michigan. Her area of specialization is
contemporary Latin American film and narrative, with a
particular emphasis on Chilean and Argentinean cinema.

Michael T. Martin is a professor in the Department of
African American and African Diaspora Studies at
Indiana University and director of its Black Film
Center/ Archive. Among the works he has edited/co-
edited are Cinemas of the Black Diaspora (Wayne State
University Press, 1995), the two-volume New Latin
American Cinema (Wayne State University Press,
1997), Studies of Development and Change in the
Modern World (Oxford University Press, 1989), and
the forthcoming Redress for Historical Injustices in the
Black Diaspora (Duke University Press). He also

directed and co-produced the award-winning feature
documentary on Nicaragua, In the Absence of Peace.

Nina K. Martin is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at
Emory University, where she teaches courses primarily
on feminist film theory and criticism, experimental film,
and animation. Her primary research areas are on inter-
sections of gender and genre, especially in horror,
action, and pornographic films. She is especially inter-
ested in the relationship between postfeminist discourses
and contemporary US female heterosexuality. Her
article on porn and comedy, "Never Laugh at a Man
with His Pants Down: the Affective Dynamics of
Comedy and Porn," is published in Peter Lehman's
edited anthology Pornography: Film and Culture
(Rutgers University Press, 2006). Her book on the
relationship between soft-core pornography and femi-
nism, Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller, is forth-
coming from University of Illinois Press.

Geoff Mayer is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is
the author of Roy Ward Baker (Manchester University
Press, 2004) and Guide to British Cinema (Greenwood
Press, 2003). He also co-edited The Oxford Companion
to Australian Film (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Paul McDonald is Reader in Film Studies and Director of
the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual
Cultures at Roehampton University, London. He is
the author of The Star System: Hollywood's Production
of Popular Identities (Wallflower Press, 2001).

Tamar Jeffers McDonald is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies
at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK. She
read English at Somerville College, Oxford, before turning
to Film Studies. She was awarded her Ph.D. for a study of
1950s virginity and Doris Day by the University of
Warwick. Her current research interests center around
the problematic representation of virginity in films, espe-
cially in Hollywood films of the 1950s, romantic com-
edies, and film costumes. Forthcoming publications
include two monographs, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets
Girl Meets Genre (Wallflower Press) and Hollywood
Catwalk: Exploring Costume In Mainstream Film (LB.
Tauris). Her edited collection, Virgin Territory:
Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, is forthcoming
from Wayne State University Press.

Todd McGowan teaches film and critical theory in the
English Department at the University of Vermont.
He is the author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory
After Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), The Impossible
David Lynch (Columbia University Press, 2007), and
The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2004),
among other works.

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

427

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Martin McLoone is Senior lecturer in Media Studies at the
University of Ulster and author of Irish Film: The
Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (British Film
Institute, 2000).

John Mercer is Field Chair in Film and Visual Culture at
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College (UK). He
is the author of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility, with
Martin Shingler (Wallflower Press, 2004).

Anne Morey is an Assistant Professor in English and
Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. She is
the author of Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the
Film Industry, 1913—1934 (University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).

Dilek Kaya Mutlu is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Graphic Design at Bilkent University,
Ankara, Turkey. Her research focuses on the history of
Turkish cinema, censorship of American films in
Turkey, and film reception. She has essays published
in the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television
and Middle Eastern Studies. She is also the author of The
Midnight Express Phenomenon: The International Reception
of the Film "Midnight Express" (Isis Press, 2005).

Steve Neale is Chair of Film Studies in the School of English
at Exeter University. He is the author of Genre and
Hollywood (Routledge, 2000), co-author of Popular Film
and Television Comedy (Routledge, 1990), editor of Genre
and Contemporary Hollywood (British Film Institute,
2002), and co-editor of Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
(Routledge, 1998). He has contributed articles to Film
Studies, Screen, and The Velvet light Trap. He is currently
working on a book entitled Epics, Spectacles and
Blockbusters: A Hollywood History with Sheldon Hall.

Bohdan Y. Nebesio is an Assistant Professor of Film
Studies at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario,
Canada. His research interests include the history of film
theory, cognitive approaches to film studies, and the
national cinemas of Eastern Europe. Among his publica-
tions are Alexander Dovzhenko: A Guide to Published
Sources (CIUS Press, 1995) and Historical Dictionary of
Ukraine (co-authored, Scarecrow Press, 2005), as well as
numerous articles and reviews in film periodicals.

Richard Neupert is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching
Professor in Film Studies at the University of Georgia.
His books include A History of the French New Wave
Cinema (University of Wisconson Press, 2002), The
End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema (Wayne State
University Press, 1995), and the English translation of
Aesthetics of Film (University of Texas Press, 1992).

Kim Newman is a Contributing Editor to Sight & Sound
and Empire magazines and author or editor of numerous
non-fiction books about film, such as Millennium
Movies (Titan Books, 1999), Nightmare Movies

(Harmony, 1989), and The BFI Companion to Horror
(Cassell, 1996). He also writes fiction and contributes to
such popular press publications as Video Watchdog,
Shivers, and The Times of London.

Bill Nichols is Director of the Graduate Program in
Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. He
edited the pioneering anthologies Movies and Methods,
Vol. 1 (1976) and Vol. 2 (1985), both published by the
University of California Press, and is author of
Representing Reality (Indiana University Press, 1991)
and Introduction to Documentary (Indiana University
Press, 2001), among other books.

Graham Petrie is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies and
English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada. He is the author of The Films of Andrei
Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, with Vida T. Johnson
(Indiana University Press, 1985); History Must Answer
to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema (Corvina
Press, 1978); and Hollywood Destinies: European
Directors in America, 1921—1931 (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1985; revised edition published by Wayne State
University Press, 2002).

Sheila Petty is Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and a
Professor of Media Studies at the University of Regina,
Canada. She edited A Call to Action: The Films of
Ousmane Sembene (Greenwood Press, 1996) and is a co-
editor of Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian
Culture (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006).

Leland Poague is Professor of English at Iowa State
University. He is the author or editor of, among other
books, Another Frank Capra (Cambridge University
Press, 1994) and Frank Capra: Interviews (University
Press of Mississippi, 2004).

Murray Pomerance is Professor of Sociology at Ryerson
University and the author of Johnny Depp Starts Here
(Rutgers University Press, 2005), An Eye for Hitchcock
(Rutgers University Press, 2004), Savage Time (Oberon
Press, 2005), and Magia dAmore (Sun and Moon Press,
1999), as well as editor or co-editor of numerous vol-
umes including From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on
Peter Jackson's lord of the Rings (Rodopi, forthcoming);
Cinema and Modernity (Rutgers University Press, 2006);
American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations
(Rutgers University Press, 2005); Bad: Infamy, Darkness,
Evil, and Slime on Screen (SUNY Press, 2003); and
Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film (New
York University Press, 2002). He is editor of the
"Horizons of Cinema" series at State University of
New York Press, co-editor with Lester D. Friedman of
the "Screen Decades" series at Rutgers University Press,
and co-editor with Adrienne L. McLean of the "Star
Decades" series at Rutgers University Press.

428

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Stephen Prince is Professor of Communication at
Virginia Tech and President of the Society for
Cinema Studies, the world's largest organization of
film scholars, academics, and professionals. In addi-
tion to many articles and essays, his recent books
include Classical Film Violence: Designing and
Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930—1968
(Rutgers University Press, 2003); The Horror Film
(Rutgers University Press, 2004); The Warrior's Camera:
The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Princeton University
Press, 1999); Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to
Film (Allyn and Bacon, 2004); A New Pot of Gold:
Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow (Scribner's,
2000); and Screening Violence (Rutgers University Press,

2000) . He was also the book review editor for Film
Quarterly for eleven years, and has recorded numerous
audio commentaries on DVDs of films by directors Akira
Kurosawa {Red Beard, Ikiru, Stray Dog, Ran, Kagemusha)
and Sam Peckinpah [Straw Dogs).

Hilary Ann Radner is Professor of Film and Media Studies
at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She is the
author of Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the
Pursuit of Pleasure (Routledge, 1995), and is co-editor
of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (Roudedge, 1993)
and Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s
(University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Vicente Rodriguez Ortega is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema
Studies at New York University. He has published sev-
eral essays in Reverse Shot and Senses of Cinema.
Currently, he is working on his dissertation, "Bodies
in Motion: Transnational Cinema in the Era of
Uneven Globalization."

Martin Rubin is Associate Director of Programming at the
Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. His books include
Thrillers (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and
Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of
Spectacle (Columbia University Press, 1993).

Catherine Russell is Professor of Film Studies at
Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is the
author of Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New
Wave Cinemas (University of Minnesota Press, 1985),
and Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the
Age of Video (Duke University Press, 1999). Her book
Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity is forth-
coming from Duke University Press.

Tom Ryall is Professor of Film History at Sheffield
Hallam University (UK). His publications include

Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Croom Helm,
1986), Blackmail (British Film Institute, 1993),
Britain and the American Cinema (Sage Publications,

2001) , and Anthony Asquith (Manchester University
Press, 2005).

Eric Schaefer is an Associate Professor in the Department
of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston.
He is the author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A
History of Exploitation Films, 1919—1959 (Duke
University Press, 1999) as well as many articles on
exploitation films. He is currently working on Massacre
of Pleasure: A History of Sexploitation Films, 1960—1979.

Thomas Schatz is the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair
in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.
He is author of four books and many articles on
Hollywood and the studio system, including The Genius
of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
(Pantheon, 1988), and editor of a four- volume anthology
on Hollywood for Routledge's Critical Concepts
series. He also edits the Film and Media Studies
Series for the University of Texas Press. Schatz is
currently Executive Director of the University of
Texas Film Institute, which provides students with
professional training in digital cinema and independ-
ent feature filmmaking in collaboration with Burnt
Orange Productions.

Peter Schepelern is an Associate Professor of Film and
Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen,
Denmark. He is the author numerous English-language
articles, including "The Making of an Auteur: Notes on
the Auteur Theory and Lars von Trier" in Visual Authorship:
Creativity and Intentionality in Media (Museum Tuscul-
anum Press, 2005), "'Kill Your Darlings': Lars von Trier
and the Origin of Dogma 95" in Purity and Provocation:
Dogma 95 (British Film Institute, 2003), and "Postwar
Scandinavian Cinema" in European Cinema (Oxford
University Press, 2003).

Michele Schreiber is a doctoral candidate in the Department
of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and a Visiting Instructor in the
Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale.

Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and
Film Studies at Seton Hall University. His publications
include The Rifleman (Wayne State University Press,
2005), Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media
(Wayne State University Press, 1999), and Crisis
Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative
Film (Maisonneuve Press, 1993). He is co-editor of
Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Scarecrow
Press, revised edition, 2004). His work has appeared
in Cineaste, Film International, Senses of Cinema,
Film Quarterly, Kinoeye, Journal of Popular Film and
Television, as well as other journals and critical
anthologies.

Timothy Shary is an Associate Professor and Director of
the Screen Studies Program at Clark University in

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

429

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous
articles and has written three books: Generation
Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary
American Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2002);
Teen Films: American Youth on Screen (Wallflower
Press, 2005); and the forthcoming Youth Culture in
Global Cinema, co-edited with Alexandra Seibel
(University of Texas Press, 2006). His commentaries
on film and media have appeared in over thirty news-
papers and magazines around the world.

David R. Shumway is Professor of English and Literary
and Cultural Studies as well as Director of the
Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He
is author of Michel Foucault (University of Virginia
Press, 1989); Creating American Civilization: A
Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic
Discipline (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and
Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis
(New York University Press, 2003).

Beverly R. Singer has been an active film and video maker
for twenty years and is currently an Associate Professor
of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the
University of New Mexico. She is the author of Wiping
the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and
Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Tytti Soila is a Professor in Cinema Studies at Stockholm
University. Her extensive publications in feminist film
theory and Nordic film history include the English-
language titles Nordic National Cinemas (co-edited,
Routledge, 1998) and The Cinema of Scandinavia
(Wallflower Press, 2005). She has also served as a
Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan and the
Pembroke Center at Brown University, and as a Bunting
fellow at Harvard University.

Janet Staiger (Advisor) is William P. Hobby Centennial
Professor in Communication at the University of Texas
at Austin. Her recent books include: Media Reception
Studies (New York University Press, 2005); Blockbuster
TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York
University Press, 2001); Perverse Spectators: The Practices
of Film Reception (New York University Press, 2000);
And- Authorship and Film, co-edited with David Gerstner
(Routledge, 2002).

David Sterritt is Professor of Theater and Film at Long
Island University, and an Adjunct Professor of Film at
Columbia University. His publications include Mad to
Be Saved: The Beats, the '50s, and Film (Southern Illinois
University Press, 1998); The Films of Jean-Luc Godard:
Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge University Press, 1999);
and the edited volume Robert Altman: Interviews
(University Press of Mississippi, 2000). He also serves
as a film critic for The Christian Science Monitor.

Victoria Sturtevant is an Assistant Professor of Film and
Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her work
focuses on feminist film criticism, modes of film com-
edy, and classical Hollywood cinema. She is currently
completing her book manuscript, Punctured Romance:
Marie Dressier 's Body of Work, a critical analysis of how
this rambunctious comedienne's feature films punctured
the rules of cinematic genre to suit the needs of a
Depression-era America.

Drake Stutesman is an editor of Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media. She has interviewed numerous cos-
tume designers and make up artists and her writings on
costume design include "Storytelling: Marlene Dietrich's
Face and John Frederics' Hats" in Fashioning Film Stars:
Dress, Culture, Identity (British Film Institute, 2005). The
author of Snake (Reaktion Books, 2005), a cultural his-
tory of snakes, she is currently writing the biography of
the milliner and couturier John Frederics.

Charles Tashiro is an independent scholar and filmmaker.
He is the author of Pretty Pictures: Production Design and
the History Film (University of Texas Press, 1998). His
articles have appeared in such publications as Film
Quarterly, Cineaste, Screen, and The Journal of Film
and Video. His film and multimedia work has screened
in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Mexico
City, and other venues.

Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Film and Television Studies
at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is the author

of Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action
Cinema (Routledge, 1993) and Working Girls: Gender
and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (Routledge, 1998), and
has edited the anthology Action and Adventure Cinema
(Routledge, 2004).

Aaron E. N. Taylor is currently a Limited Term Assistant
Professor in the Department of Communications, Popular
Culture and Film at Brock University, St. Catharines,
Ontario, Canada. He has written about superheroes
for The Journal of Popular Culture, the marketing
of Winnie-the-Pooh for the anthology Rethinking
Disney: Private Control and Public Dimensions (Wesleyan
University Press, 2005), and on Canadian exploitation
films for Cineaction. At present, he is at work on a
book-length project about empathetic engagement with
filmic characters.

John C. Tibbetts is an Associate Professor of Film at the
University of Kansas. He is the author of The American
Theatrical Film (The University of Wisconsin Press,
1985) and co-editor with James M. Welsh of The
Encyclopedia of Stage Plays Into Film (Facts on File, 2005).

Drew Todd is a Film Studies lecturer at San Jose State
University in the Radio-TV-Film-Theatre Department.
He has published on a variety of topics related to film

430

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

studies, including the history of crime films, dandyism
in classical Hollywood films, and the poetics of Satyajit
Ray's cinema.

Frank P. Tomasulo is Professor and Director of the BFA
Program at the College of Motion Picture, Television,
and Recording Arts at Florida State University. The
author of over sixty scholarly articles and essays, and
over 150 academic papers, Tomasulo has also served as
editor of the Journal of Film and Video (1991-1996) and
Cinema Journal (1997-2002). He is co-editor of the
recent anthology More Than a Method: Trends and
Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (Wayne
State University Press, 2004).

Abril Trigo is Distinguished Humanities Professor of
Latin American Cultures at Ohio State University. He is
the author of Caudillo, estado, nacion. Literatura, historia e
ideologia en el Uruguay (Ediciones Hispamerica, 1990);
^Cultura Uruguay a o culturas linyeras? {Para una cartografia
de la neomodernidad posuruguaya) (1997); Memorias
migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diaspora uruguaya
(Beatriz Viterbo Editora/Ediciones Trilce, 2003); and
The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, co-authored
with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Rios (Duke University
Press, 2004).

Maureen Turim is Professor of English and Film Studies
at the University of Florida. She is the author of
Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (UMI Research Press,
1985), Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History
(Routledge, 1989), The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images
of a Japanese Iconoclast (University of California Press,
1998), and over eighty essays in anthologies and jour-
nals, including essays on trauma and memory.

Paul van Yperen is a film historian, who publishes and
lectures on the history of the film poster, Dutch cinema,
and film criticism. Together with Bastiaan Anink, he
writes a column on film posters in the Dutch film
journal Skrien and co-wrote the books De kleurrijke
flmaffiches van Frans Bosen (Walburg Pers, 1999) and
Pioneer of the Dutch Film Poster: Dolly Rudeman 1902—
1980 (2005). For the volume The Cinema of the Low
Countries (Wallflower Press, 2004), he wrote an essay on
the film The Northerners. Formerly curator of the poster
collection at the Netherlands Filmmuseum, he is now
the communication manager for Premsela, Dutch
Design Foundation. Currently, he is preparing a disser-
tation on Dutch postwar film criticism.

Jyotika Virdi is an Associate Professor in the Department
of Communication at the University of Windsor in
Canada. She is the author of The Cinematic
ImagiNation: Social History Through Indian Popular
Films (Rutgers University Press, 2003). Her work on
Indian cinema has appeared in Film Quarterly, Jump

Cut, Screen, and Visual Anthropology; she has also co-
authored an essay in the anthology Contemporary Asian
Cinema (Berg Publishers, 2006).

Kristen Anderson Wagner is a Ph.D. candidate at the
University of Southern California School of Cinema-
Television. She has written extensively on the work of
female comedians in American silent film.

Gregory A. Waller is Chair of the Department of
Communication and Culture at Indiana University.
He is the author of The Living and the Undead
(University of Illinois Press, 1986) and Main Street
Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in
a Southern City, 1896-1930 (Smithsonian Books,
1995). He is the editor of American Horrors: Essays on
the Modern American Horror Film (University of Illinois
Press, 1988) and Moviegoing in America (Blackwell
Publishers, 2001).

Janet Wasko holds the Knight Chair in Communication
Research at the University of Oregon. She is the author

of Movies and Money: Financing the American Film
Industry (Ablex, 1982), Understanding Disney: The
Manufacture of Fantasy (Polity, 2001), and How
Hollywood Works (Sage, 2004).

Philip Watts is an Associate Professor in the Department
of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. He
is the author of Allegories of the Purge: How Literature
Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and
Intellectuals in France (Stanford University Press, 1999).

Elisabeth Weis is Professor of Film at Brooklyn College
and The Graduate Center of The City University of
New York. Her books include Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, co-edited with John Belton (Routledge,
1992), and The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's
Sound Track (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1982).

Paul Wells is Director of the Animation Academy,
Loughborough University, UK. He has published
widely in the field of animation including
Understanding Animation (Routledge, 1998),
Animation and America (Rutgers, 2002), Fundamentals
of Animation (AVA, 2006), and Halas & Batchelor
Cartoons: An Animated History (South Bank Books,
2006). He made a three part BBC TV series called
Animation Nation in 2005, and has also authored a
number of television and theatre scripts.

Jim Welsh is Professor Emeritus of English at Salisbury
University, the founder of the Literature/Film
Association, and the co-founding editor of Literaturel
Film Quarterly. His latest book is the 2nd revised edition
of The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film, co-edited with
John C. Tibbetts (Facts on File, 2005).

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

431

NOTES ON ADVISORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Kristen Whissel is an Assistant Professor in the Film
Studies Program at the University of California,
Berkeley. She has published articles on early American
film in Camera Obscura, Screen, and the anthology A
Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke University Press,
2002). Her book Picturing American Modernity: Traffic,
Technology, and the Moving Pictures is forthcoming from
Duke University Press.

Michael Williams lectures in Film Studies at the
University of Southampton, UK. He has published sev-
eral articles on film stars, sexuality, and European cin-
ema, and his monograph Ivor Novello: Screen Idol, a
contextual study of Britain's leading matinee-idol of
the 1920s, was published by the British Film Institute
in 2003. He is currently co-editing a book on British
cinema and World War I, and is researching in prep-
aration for a monograph on stardom, classicism, and fan
culture.

Robin Wood has taught film studies at Queen's University
in Canada, Warwick University in England, and York
University in Canada, where he continues to give grad-
uate courses as Senior Scholar. He has written books on
Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman,
Arthur Penn, and Satyajit Ray, and is currently working
on a book on Michael Haneke. His other books are
Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia
University Press, 1986) and Sexual Politics and
Narrative Film (Columbia University Press, 1998).

Rochelle Wright has taught Scandinavian literature and
Swedish film at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign for more than three decades and publishes
in both of these areas. She is the author of The Visible

Wall: Jews and Other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1998) and articles
on Alf Sjoberg, Ingmar Bergman, and contemporary
trends in Swedish film.

Maurice Yacowar is Professor of English and Film Studies
at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His books
include The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television 's
Greatest Series (Third Edition, Continuum, 2005).

Marilyn Yaquinto is a lecturer in Ethnic and American
Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University spe-
cializing in cinema. Her research deals with representa-
tions of policing and deviance, and her publications
include the book, Pump Em Full of Lead: A Look at
Gangsters on Film (Twayne, 1998), and a chapter about
movie molls and mob wives in Action Chicks: New
Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004). She is co-editor of the forthcoming
collection Redress for Historical Injustices in the Black
Diaspora to be published by Duke University Press. As
a former journalist with the Los Angeles Times, she also
shares in its Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Los
Angeles riots.

Xu Ying is an Assistant Editor of International Journal of
Comic Art and Asian Cinema. She was a contributor of
numerous articles to The Dictionary of Chinese and
Foreign Film and Television (China Broadcasting and
TV Press, 2001), The Dictionary of Chinese and Foreign
Film & Television Masterpieces (International Culture
Press, 1993), and The Dictionary of Chinese Actors
(China Film Press, 1993). From 1985 to 2003, she
was with the China Film Archive, her last position as
Associate Archivist.

432

SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM

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